


2am on jupiter

by starlightpng



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ADHD, Adventures, Alcohol, Alien Keith (Voltron), Astrophysics Student Lance, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Past Abuse, Road Trip, Slow Burn, Stargazing, some "hey man" references in there bc why not aha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-12 02:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11727675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlightpng/pseuds/starlightpng
Summary: Lance has always believed in aliens- but falling in love with a beautiful boy who fell out of the sky was never his plan.Or: In which a slightly lost, sometimes sad astrophysics student meets an alien, and together they break into flower shops, stargaze on volcanic lakes, steal a van, and learn to revel in every moment of existence.Keith's florid, flushed cheeks glitter in the moonlight-- and Lance feels like he's swallowed whole universes, balls of fire and smoke and starswept nebulae drifting inside of his chest, like clouds.





	2am on jupiter

**Author's Note:**

> hi!! i worked on this throughout exam season because my prioritisation skills are broken. this was for the voltron big bang and i had an incredible artist working with me -- @z-bop on tumblr -- featured at the end!!  
> for now, please have an astrophysicist lance who loves keith dearly, just like me
> 
> PINTEREST BOARD FOR FIC: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/starglowed/2am-on-jupiter/

**i.**

Lance is six years old when he concludes that aliens exist, and that he's going to find them one day.

" _Mama_ ," he whines earnestly as he hangs onto the sleeve of his mother's jacket, ocean eyes fixed on the skies above. "Mama, why wouldn't there be  _anyone_  else out there, if you said the universe goes on for... for  _ever_?"

They're on a camping trip, mother and son; their tent glows amber and gold like streaks of sunset, a fire pitched before them with sparks and crackling flames of starlight. Lance's mother sighs and her breath swirls outward in pools of smoke, and she stubs her flickering cigarette out in the grass beneath them, reaching out and wrapping one arm around her son warmly, tentatively.

"You can't think silly things exist just because you  _want_  them to, Lance," she says firmly but kindly, her face twisting the slightest bit, fingers running over where her engagement ring had been one day. Lance knows that his mother misses his father- the father he'd never met, the monster who'd run off as soon as he was born and never,  _never_  returned again after that- but still, that holds no relevancy to  _aliens_ , no relevancy to the whole wide  _universe_  out there just  _waiting_  to be discovered.

He peers down at his mother's hand lingering comfortingly near his own, and it's big and honeyed, calloused with the aftermath of their disastrous tent-pitching. He squints up into the darkness, the glitter staining the sky in spills of molten stardust, the planets painted russet-red and twilight like maraschino cherries and silver-tipped galaxies- and he knows what he has to do, now, knows what he has to do to get her off his tracks.

_If that's what you want me to believe, Mama, then... I will._

"You're right, maybe there  _aren't_  any green blobs coming to find us," he relents (or  _pretends_  to relent) with a dramatic fling of his arms in surrender, snagging a marshmallow in the meantime from the packet opened to roast on the campfire. The corners of his mother's lips quirk up, just a little, and he feels snakes writhing inside his stomach for lying.

"Good boy," she whispers, and Lance bares his teeth weakly as he eats his marshmallow up, obedient as always. But his heart aches when he gazes up at the sky again, gazes up at the concoction of stars and moonlight and cosmic dust drifting against the currents of space; a lone shooting star appears for one ephemeral moment, firework-bright, before dissolving into the tendrils of dark matter forever, forever,  _forever_.

 _It's just a momentary white line_ , his mother would say.  _Nothing special, Lance. Focus on the real things._

But Lance looks, and he dreams, and he wonders, and he  _knows_. Somewhere in him, somewhere deep,   _deep_  down- and perhaps it's in the calcium shifting star-bright beneath his bones, or maybe in the iron flooding like electricity through his veins- he knows that there's got to be  _something_  out there, something big and beautiful and  _exquisite_  beyond words. He remembers it as his mother blows out the candles in their tent, and he remembers it as he reaches his head out one last time to glance upwards at the glow of Cassiopeia, glistening divine and sea-soft above the silvery clouds.  _I'll find you_ , he mouths quietly into the darkness, and then pulls back, tucks himself into the wildflower folds of his blanket as he tries to fall asleep.  _I'll find you_ , he promises,  _and I'll prove them all wrong._

**ii.**

"I can't prove him wrong, Hunk, I can't fucking do  _any_  of this!" Lance screeches at his physics textbook; and the other languishing people in the coffee shop glare at him for the seventh time in a row, tired of his noise and ministrations and hourly mental breakdowns.

"Dude,  _please_  stop shrieking, everyone's looking at us!" his best friend Hunk yells in return, and a single drop of sweat rolls down his forehead. His eyes dart from side to side as he offers his widest beams to the frustrated customers all around them, what he hopes will suffice as yet  _another_  apology; and then he leans down to where Lance is banging his head continuously against the table, a broken record player stuck on repeat, hissing into his ear with as much patience as he unfortunately  _still_  harbours by some means of a miracle.

"Lance, buddy," he whispers, and Lance just lets out a long, exaggerated, somewhat-genuinely-pained whine. Hunk sighs deeply.  
" _Who_  exactly is it that you can't prove wrong, like- I'm sure talking about it will make it better, so, y'know? Go ahead and rant to me instead of trying to self-induce a concussion, maybe. Also-  _wow_ , do you need more coffee?"  
"You're too good to me, bro," Lance groans and lifts his frazzled head up wearily as Hunk waves over the same waitress who's been serving them for the past three hours, ordering Lance's fourth  _extra extra large coffee with three sugars and whipped cream and the unhealthiest dose of caffeine legal, please, thank you so much, don't worry, I'm sure he'll be fine._

" _Literally_ , man, Professor Sendak has been practically up my  _ass_  lately about how shit I am and how I'm too  _'dense'_ to major in astrophysics- denser than a black hole, even!" Lance wails, and Hunk really  _does_  feel sorry at him at this point, because Sendak is the kind of exuberant teacher who drives his students to drink and contemplate suicide every other day.

"And you wanna know what the worst thing is, Hunk? The very worst thing? It's that he's  _right_ , as well!" he cries, with his face contorted in melodramatic anguish.  
"I can't even get my head round the _philosophy_  of black holes, let alone the actual  _equations_  and shit involved in orbital mechanics! How will I ever figure any of this out?! Tell me!  _How_."  
"I think you should give up astrophysics, Lance," Hunk advises helpfully as Lance whimpers about how his  _first love was always space but I suck too much at math to do any of this, dude, what is my life even.  
_ "I'm deadly serious, okay? Major in memes, instead! Move to Texas and become a simple meme farmer who doesn't pay taxes and lives in a caravan."  
"I need  _realistic solutions_ , man," Lance groans through gritted teeth, and points to the pages spread before him brimming with complex formulae and abstract equations and complicated pure math. "Like, I love physics and I'm not going to give it up like that, okay?! It's just that I also happen to be  _extremely_  fucking shit at it and my teacher loathes me! My life is such a goddamn  _mess!"  
_ "You're not bad at math and physics," Hunk coos and his tone is saturated with some sincerity, now, his voice low and calm and soothing. 

He supposes his attempt to be serious is a lost cause, though, because Lance remains about as soothed as a house on fire- but  _still_ , at least he's trying, which is a lot more than a bunch of  other people have done.  
"If you sucked that hard at math, you wouldn't have been accepted into Sendak's advanced class, remember?" he gently reminds him, and Lance just pouts miserably, prompting more reassurance.  
"Look, you've been working your socks off for like, what-  _three_  straight hours, now? -and you  _really_  need to take a break, or you'll just end up hating your life even though you're doing what you love. So, go!"  
"But if I take a break, I'll never get  _anything_  done, buddy, you don't understand-" Lance begins to complain, but Hunk cuts him off with a stern countenance, gathering up his textbooks and stationery and discarded coffee cups with an aggression quite unlike his gentle giant persona.  
"Nope nope  _nopeity_  nope, Lance, you aren't going to get anything done if you continue having breakdowns at a dingy café instead of remembering to breathe," he says firmly, shoving everything into Lance's glittery backpack.  
"Also, I major in literal goddamn " _rocket science_ " aeronautical engineering, so I think I  _do_  understand actually, man... ya feel?" 

Lance finally shuts up. Hunk guides the drained physics student up softly with a warm hand on the small of his back, and pushes him towards the coffee shop’s exit with a kindly shove, gesticulating after him as he pushes the door open.

"Go get some fresh air and stargaze or something, and remember why you want to study all this space stuff in the first place! You can watch a movie with Pidge and me, afterwards," Hunk waves at Lance, and he smiles shakily at his larger-than-life friend, the one guy who's been capable of dealing with his extravagant, insecure bullshit all throughout these years. He loves Hunk.  
"Star Wars?" he pleads with puppy-dog eyes, before he steps out of the shop.  
"Star Wars," Hunk complies, and Lance turns around, feeling his heartbeat slow down for the first time in hours. 

**iii.**

See, it's not like Lance  _wants_  to be overly dramatic and marginally insecure, really. He grew up on the taste of thrills and paper plane promises; the feeling of skipping stones into salty oceans, seaglass waves leaving nebulae littered cosmic-bright on his ribcage.

He'd just never thought it'd be like _this_. Years ago had seen him perched on his mother's balcony night after night, binoculars grasped securely between his hands as he'd searched for signs of extra-terrestrial life among the stars.  _Libra, Orion, Lyra, Ursa Major_... He'd pronounce constellation after constellation like saccharine-sweet foreign languages on his tongue, so strange yet so  _familiar_  he'd feel like there was a place carved out for him up there, seated high amidst the penny-gold supernovae.

ADHD was a bitch, though. He'd inherited it from the man he'd never known, but who had contributed to half his genetic material (Lance  _refuses_  to acknowledge him as his father, that anonymous monster isn't even _worthy_ of a title) and now,  _now_  he has to work nine times as hard as everyone else to achieve mediocre results. Sure, it's true that Lance sincerely  _does_  enjoy ploughing through page after page of complicated math formulae (it makes him feel  _capable_ ) and he finds magic laced between the lines of his astronomy textbooks, rambling on and on about quantum entanglement and time-warp theories. The only thing that's ever captured his attention and somehow  _sustained_  throughout the years has been the depths of outer space, which he thinks is pretty ironic, given that most of it is made solely of dark matter and mysterious energies.  _Still_.

It's just that there's people like Professor Sendak who refuse to take his needs into account and chastise him for being a little slower on the get-go than others, which is totally unfair, because Lance  _prides_  himself on his determination and the amount of effort he puts into... well, pretty much damn  _everything_ , if he's being completely honest.

It sucks. His college career has, so far, comprised of studying underneath his bedsheets till 5am with a torch, spending the entirety of his days in extra lectures, and even having his Friday nights off at home with Hunk and Pidge playing academic games where he forces them to ask him question after question on his subject matter.

He remembers the one time they tried to take him along to a party, which on all accounts should've been fun because Lance really  _does_  like socialising and humouring others- but he'd ended up the only sober one under the strobe lights after everyone had passed out on the floor, furiously scribbling in a workbook about aneutronic fusion and tearing up slightly at all the time he'd wasted instead. He'd also driven everyone home afterwards in approximately 19 trips with his car, which might have  _felt_  noble at the time, except for the fact that he was a broke-ass college student with _very_ little money to pay for fuel.

But oh, well.

"This is how things are always gonna be, pal, you've just got to cope and show everyone what you  _can_  do," Lance mutters to himself pseudo-confidently as he reaches his happy place, Quintana Beach. He'd found it in his first year of college but also discovered that since the summer of 2049, it'd been largely abandoned; people generally chose to retire to their artificial home-beaches instead, where they could control the tidal height and not risk drowning or bad weather.

Granted, there's something  _beautiful_  about natural beaches that keeps Lance coming back to them, returning  _despite_ the dangers that climate change has definitely already brought about. He hoists himself over the looming iron gates and drops stealthily onto the moss underneath, a carpet of lush green sprawling over the gravelly path to the sand itself. He dusts off his shoulders and picks his way through the sunflowers peeking up from the asphalt, tiny flower-twined glimmers of new hope, and then-

"Fucking  _yes_!” he moans as he launches himself onto the grains of sand, all long, tan limbs tangled up in each other and a body functioning on stress, spite, and caffeine. The friction (ha,  _Physics_ ) doesn't stop him from rolling and rolling till his crumpled clothes are _coated_  in sand, and after a fair few minutes, he _finally_  winds up in the only place he feels like he truly belongs down here on Earth- staring out, fingertips clasped together desperately, into the shores of the cosmic ocean.

"I've missed you," he murmurs quietly, and looks with tired eyes into the dusk-stained horizon, the sunlight just beginning to melt and drip down the azure like star-swept ink. The world is silent, bar from the waves gently kissing each other, and Lance revels in this rare moment of solitude from the buzzing nature of college life; everything is smudged with molten sunshine, and the sea's crevices are painted deep aurelion, pure gold. The air is fragile as it lingers on the cracks between his lips, precarious like it's verging on something  _more_ , always, always- and he smiles.

He reaches out and grips onto a shell tightly, bringing it up to shield the dying embers of solar rays warming the ocean breeze. "You look lonely," he whispers as he watches the sky's colours seeping into it like sea salt, all pinks and yellows and sundust and twilight. He knows deep inside, though, that he's talking about himself.  
"What are you missing from your life, then, Mr. Shell? Motivation? Success? A lover?"

To his dismay, the shell doesn't answer him and his peace is joltingly interrupted as all of a sudden, a guttural echo roars in his ears and he hears what sounds like neutron-star thunder _shattering_ across the skyline, the hum of a deafening drone sweeping across the falling sun and piercing into his very bloodstream.

" _Fuck_!" he shrieks in reflex as the wind begins to abruptly pick up and his hair feels like it's about to be wrenched out of his skull; he drops the seashell on the sand like it's crackling wildfire, and scrambles back on his hands and feet as he sees something soaring, no,  _hurtling_  out of the sudden charcoal clouds shrouding the sunset, plunging down and down and  _down_  at the speed of fucking  _light_  straight towards Lance and he screams, yanking his body upwards to  _run run run_  too fast for his bones to catch up, slipping on his shitty Adidas trainers through the sand as the hum just gets louder and louder and then he fucking  _trips_  and there's sand in his mouth and shells in his eyes and a heat like the fucking Big Bang has exploded against his spine, fire painting his vertebrae in wavelengths of pain, burning, burning,  _pain_...

And then, _silence_.

Silence echoes out like the ringing of a bullet, razor-sharp and deafeningly shrill in Lance's ears.  _Burning_. He's pressed flat facing the ground somewhere halfway along the beach, scarlet-stained scrapes and newly-forming bruises stark on his arms and feet. His mouth tastes like sandcastles and dunes dipped in sea salt, and there’s a migraine beginning to scream out on the left side of his head like a bomb, like pure and unadulterated fucking  _poison_.

 _Burning_.

 _What the fuck, what the fuck, was that a fucking tornado, what the fuck?!_  His brain supplies unhelpfully at a billion miles a second as he spits out the grit that's stuck on the inside of his mouth. There's adrenaline hammering through him that  _hurts_  as it slams against the walls of his veins and eyeballs, battery acid insides painted spirit and white lightning, and he decides to himself that he's got to leave the beach  _right now_ ; something has injured him and crash-landed with all the grace of heavenly destruction, and Lance may have always been a fan of planes and unidentified flying objects, but he is not ready to wind up in some government nuclear _weapon_ test or something.

Or...

 _Is_  he?

"Get up and look, Lance, it's gonna be a fucking _great_  story for Hunk and Pidge to hear," he mumbles fervently to himself under his breath, cursing the adrenaline junkie that thrives deep, deep inside of him- but he knows that despite the gravity and  _weirdness_  of this situation, despite the throbbing that's surging through his entire being, he'll be caught up in an asphyxiating web of remorse if he doesn't get up and inspect the debris of whatever the hell has fallen from outer space, supposedly.

Flinching at the acrid ache searing like a kaleidoscope between his brows, he props himself up with a groan before heaving his body weight onto his legs once more, standing tall but fragile as a spring flower. _You delicate little bitch_ , he thinks in a daze as he blindly stumbles forward to where he'd been standing and ruminating mere minutes ago, sight-lines smoky with the sour-sweet taste of confusion and earnest excitement; the asteroid belts at the edges of his vision are gleaming, snowy white, distorted shapes in pink and azure and sunrise shades floating around like butterflies and hurricanes.  _Stunning_ , Lance decides, but after a moment his blurry-soft brain clears and the butterflies evanesce and he snaps his head up distinctly, delirious to see what he's been looking for all this time.

He expects to see a dilapidated weapons tank, part of a collapsed government helicopter nestled on the shoreline as the last dying rays of sunlight bloom crimson across the beach. He expects to see a saturated sunset, still dissolving, still deliquescing despite the crash-landing of an aircraft, cloaking the heavens in sunflower yellow and shades of watercolour saffron. He expects to see the roaring tides and sea dyed golden, still shifting and pulsating like a broken heartbeat from the wind movement of a fucking government plane.  
  
Instead, he _doesn't_ see any of that. Instead, he _doesn't_  see a government plane.

Instead, his heart stops.

Instead, he sees...  
  
_Holy motherfucking shit.  Is that a fucking spaceship?_

**iv.**

_(Oh.)_

_(Fuck.)_

**v.**

_"Sir, could you check this for me and tell me the probability of it happening?"  
__Lance is thirteen, wide-eyed, and hopeful, his head brimming with dreams and desires, his glasses perched pseudo-coolly on the edge of his oily nose._  

 _He's mature enough to fathom that he's just another hormonal teenager, the ideas in his head sometimes implausible, but that's precisely why he needs confirmation from his science teacher about his thought processes; he's shoved a 21-page ramble on the probability of alien existence into Mr. Ealing's hands, and waits patiently for his teacher's answer, expecting to be rewarded.  
  
_ _"Sir? How good is it, then? I even managed to put the Drake Equation in there, it's actually really super swag stuff even if it took ultra-long-"_

 _He is not rewarded.  
  
_ _"McClain, what is the meaning of this?" his teacher demands with a part-angered, part-mocking sardonic lilt in his voice, and Lance feels his heart sink all the way to the ground, heavy as though there's a brick tangled around every organ within him.  
_ _"I've been trying out some theo- theoretical physics, Sir, trying to see if I can prove the existence of aliens once and for all! People have already tried, you know, so it's not like it's completely out there, I still kind of make sense-"_

_His teacher rips the pages in one brief, fleeting half-second, Lance's carefully hole-punched and taped-together sheets swirling to the floor like snowflakes. Dead bodies. Decay._

_Lance stares._

_"Aliens don't exist," Mr Ealing says shortly, and coughs to hide a condescending laugh, eyes filled with mirth and bemusement at Lance's apparently infantile antics.  
__"You know as well as I do that only children believe in aliens, and you're not a toddler anymore! Come on!" he chides patronisingly, and shakes his greasy, matted head as Lance simply continues to look down, down, down- down at the hours and hours and days and_ months _it had taken to solve through everything in his messy head, attention span too short to write, having to speak into the expensive microphone he bought with his own measly allowance to record and typify his thoughts, obsessing and fixating over fixing his grammatical errors even though grammar doesn't really matter in making scientific breakthroughs but it does matter when everyone insults him for having ADHD and now he'll never get anywhere and he's a failure and all his efforts were for nothing and-_

 _"Oh, McClain?" Mr Ealing adds, jolting Lance out of his escalating mania and making him stand straight to attention.  
_ _"Yes, sir?" he returns blankly, and his teacher shoots him a wicked smirk, still imbued with all the glee of superiority and domination.  
_ _"Next time if you want your science to be taken seriously, don't add a bucket list of things to do when you find an alien on the back of your work. It's unprofessional-" he laughs malevolently, "- and I'm pretty sure that 'breaking the Earthly laws', 'going on adventures' and- what's this?- 'stealing... flowers' won't be getting you anywhere in life. Or happen. With aliens. Ever."_

 _Lance flushes a deep, deep red, stands brokenly and lets the heat submerge his cheeks like they're sinks of embarrassment, of degradation. He bends down and picks up the one scrap of paper left intact, with his judiciously crafted bucket list on the back- peeps up, sees Mr Ealing rolling his eyes- thrusts the paper in his blazer pocket and bows his head, blistering tears pricking behind his eyelids as he apologises.  
__"I'm sorry, Sir, I won't do it again," he spits reluctantly, untruthfully.  
__"Of course aliens don't exist. I was just being dumb and stupid. Forgive me."_  

**vi.**

Lance doesn't know how or why but he's running, running, running back towards this- towards this  _thing_ , this spaceship, tripping and lumbering over his own feet as his heart batters against his ribcage like cracked fault lines, a million writhing dragons screaming with all the colours of chaos and swallowing fire inside his very chest,  _running running running_. There's a lump in the back of his throat like Jupiter has torn through his lungs, and he can't breathe, can't breathe, can't  _breathe_  as water streams out of his eyeballs and he slips and blunders on the sand and his mind is  _blazing_  and alight with every chide, every humiliation, every  _disgrace_  he's ever gotten in his naïve, seemingly stupid life of failures and impossible hypotheses- but somehow, somehow there's a fucking spaceship that's fallen out of the sky in front of his very  _eyes_ , and it sounds ridiculous and drug-induced but as Lance nears it, he appreciates that this can't be _just_ a caffeine hallucination.

It's beautifully broken. That's the first thing Lance can concede. Panes of shimmering metal, bathed in lustrous silver and diamond-plated bars, twist and turn and fuse and coil around each other like star-studded vines, a structure too complex to be built by anything other than intelligent life. The ship is smooth-edged and there seem to be biological life forms- carbon-based organisms, Lance's mind ticks off- woven in between the metalwork too, synergies of glistening, lucid leaves and neon-stained flowers illuminating the beach all around, laced together in loose knits of gem-bright pearls of light and luminescence. It pulses slightly, and Lance can't help but feel his mouth drop open at the magnificence of it all despite the fact that he's approaching a goddamn  _spaceship_ , for Christ's sake; for all he knows it's a vehicle from the depths of the cosmos that could be  _hostile_ , coated in brilliant flora that could very well poison him and seems to be decomposing in hyper-time, the bronze rusting of the iron happening ultra-fast before him as though suspended in a time lapse.

Granting all this, it's been a long day and Lance has always believed in extra-terrestrial life, so he isn't actually  _stunned_ , not as much as anyone ordinarily would be. Just startled, really, and a bit vexed that it hadn't had the decency to pop out of nowhere when he'd needed it  _most_ \- to prove himself to varying teachers over the years, obviously- but most of all, what he _does_  feel is increasingly curious. There's one incredibly large expanse of clouded glass over what appears to be the front of the ship, tiny droplets of mist constrained flat on the window like tiny, gamma-ray stars; and Lance leans over to investigate what it could be, perhaps his best means to look inside and see what  _alien_  technology might actually be like, technology that Pidge and Hunk would totally dig and he could use in his  _own_  research...

But all of a sudden, the window blasts open in an explosion of sparks and supernova-bright flares, propelling Lance back faster than the speed of light for the  _second_  time today yet again; and rapidly, a cascade of frigid, translucent smoke spirals outwards in drifts of icy blue and midnight, and it stings against his eyes white-hot, like hydrochloric acid would. That isn't the worst of it, though.  
  
Lance can practically  _taste_ the virulent metal as his blood pressure cranks upwards and a heart attack is inevitable, all because he sees a dark figure emerging glacially from the shadows of the smoke- all because this is basically every fucking science-fiction comic, novel, and film he's ever indulged in, and he's about to get incinerated by heat rays or get eaten by some advanced alien species, he can feel it raging already like tidal waves in the soul of his bones. _Tempestuous_. He acquiesces, for sure now, that he's about to die.

 _Does the alien have tentacles at the very least?_  he wonders.  _Is it an octopus-looking hybrid, or maybe a beautiful mermaid and siren sort of creature that'll kill me for pleasure?  
  
_ As he debates in the miasma of his trauma, the silhouette comes into view while the mist scatters, like fairy dust floating back to the tip of the north star. Lance shuts his eyelids tight, tight,  _tight_  and braces himself to open them once again, knowing it's probably going to be the last thing he'll ever be blessed enough to gaze upon, perhaps a monster from one of those conspiracy theories he despises that can devour  _him_ , a grown college student, in one bite...

And he opens his eyes, and instead of nine googly, yellow-painted sclerae, he sees only two.

Instead of a monster, he sees-

A boy.

" _What the fuck_ ," he manages to involuntarily (and eloquently) subvert for the millionth instance in about three minutes, not quite believing what his vision is telling him.  
"What the _fuckity_ fuck."

It's a boy, or, well, a boy- _resembling_  alien. Tall, about his height. Facial structure enshrouded by long, matted hair. Fists clenched and quivering. Too ordinary-looking for Lance to even function.

He absolutely _doesn't_ know what to do right now, so he decides to act on his impulses, and rises to his feet abruptly. He strolls over to this boy- _alien_  - and grabs him by his head.  
  
Then, he punches him in the face, exhaling as he collapses against the beach.  
  
_(Perfect.)_

Lance looks up while this boy-  _alien_ \- sputters in an altogether human way, and instead of helping him he scans the slowly disintegrating spaceship as it crumbles with the harsh, cloying-acid scent of dying roses, glowing every colour of the spectrum as it burns from the alien having wrecked it to get  _outside_  in the first place. It's surreal and ethereal in a way unlike anything else in the world, the flames twirling and swaying and dancing like collision galaxies light-years away, bleeding into the darkening atmosphere with licks of scarlet heavy against the dusk. The alien shoves Lance with a superhuman  _(superalien?)_  strength and stands up, panting. Lance's brain is on lockdown. He humbly stares.

"Is this how you greet each other on Earth?" the boy says, and Lance can feel himself inadvertently backing away now, trying his very hardest not to scream. The boy has a deep, roughened voice with a sort of otherworldly, melodic lilt to it, and he can feel it between his ribs like birdsong; but at the same time it  _terrifies_  Lance just how, just how  _normal_  this all seems, like a storybook for kids- boy meets boy on beach, boy and boy become friends and frolic into the sunset. Never mind that it's a fucking  _alien_  from fucking  _outer space_.

"How can you speak _English_ ," Lance manages to choke out incredulously, which is the first thing that comes into his dense head. The boy chuckles profoundly, and for some reason Lance gets the sentiment that this isn't something he usually does, judging by how hard- and how  _sincerely_ \- he's laughing. He feels a little more at ease now, and peers closely at the strange creature, skin glowing pale like moondust and black spacesuit intact despite the crash, and  _eyes_ - eyes slanted slightly, glinting like eclipses behind long, starglow eyelashes, the only alien part about him being their violet-tinted hue. Lance's heart shifts at the sadness reflecting in them, just behind the glassy purple irises in shades of cool, and realises-  _oh. Oh. Maybe he isn’t so different, after all.  
_ "I researched before I came here, and learnt English." the boy informs him, simply. 

Suddenly, the weight of the situation hits Lance like a ton of bricks and he staggers forward, fumbling to grab for the boy's polished arm and drag him out till they're back behind the gates of the beach, the iron bars shielding them from view so they don't look like they started a cosmic goddamn _wildfire_ on a prohibited beach. _Motherfucker_.  
"Okay, listen up here, Mr.  _Alien_ ," Lance hisses, and doesn't dare make eye contact with the boy.  
"If you researched before you came here, then you probably know that I've just broken the law, and in addition aliens don't really tend to _drop_  out of the sky every Saturday like they're about to go to some Earthling festival. What I’m saying is that, like, it's not like you're  _not_  welcome here, but you're lucky as hell that  _I_  found you, because I'm pretty sure no one else would react as normally as I'm doing right now! Because I'm not scared, okay? Totally  _not_  scared! How are you doing, you goddamn  _alien_?! Why did you crash-land on my  _planet_?!" 

Okay, so Lance  _is_  scared, and he can feel the beginnings of panic curling in his stomach, thudding against his chest that's constricted like a vice and his breaths are coming out in jerky, staccato shivers, eyeballs round with terror-  _just breathe, Lance, breathe, don’t panic, it’s just a fucking alien, this is completely goddamn normal, breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe._

The boy appears somewhat alarmed as Lance clutches onto the gate to ground himself, and he gingerly comes closer, fiddling with his glowing hands awkwardly.  
"Hey, um, okay- first off, just breathe or respire or whatever you do, okay? Please don't die, you're the only one who can show me around this place," he says all in a rush, floundering over his words as though he's asking Lance on a date. It's quite a familiar and vaguely amusing feeling, and Lance can feel his heartbeat draw out and steady itself again, appeased by just how scared this  _alien_  seems to be, too. As though he can read Lance’s mind, he speaks again. 

"Also,  _look_ \- I'm not an alien, so stop calling me that," he declares irritably, and fixates straight on Lance's eyes. He swallows.  
"I'm just a space traveller, and my name's Keith. I'm researching all the beauties and wonders of Earth, so I know this is going a little fast, but it'd be really great if you could help me... honestly? Please? And, thank you." he finishes with a cough, the politeness gawkily forced in as an afterthought; and Lance accepts that this is the strangest fucking thing that will likely  _ever_  happen to him, so he... he just goes along with it. For now.  
"For an alien, you sure don't have an exotic name," he nervously laughs, exaggerated and kind of theatrical, but that kind of tone sure is all he can get out of his system right now _other_ than fearful.  
" _K-E-I-T-H._ Keith. It's kind of prehistoric, really."  
Keith narrows his eyes.  
"Are you sure _you_  aren't the alien, here? I mean, you were breaking Earth laws in the first place by being on a beach, and I was just trying to land somewhere without people! Plus, you're not like any of the humans I've read about. None of them ever greet by sparring. You're weird," he concludes, confidently. He steps closer to Lance, an almost competitive flame burning in the depths of his purple eyes, and it's so irresistibly  _human_  that Lance gives in to the challenge, as well.  
"How do we greet each other, then, pray tell?"  
"Like this," Keith mutters, and grabs Lance's hand, lacing their fingers together in emphasised, almost  _intimate_  slow motion, before shaking it  _way_  too vigorously. He looks up expectantly almost like a too-eager puppy, and Lance finds himself snickering for real this time, feeling warmth flooding through his body for the first time all  _day_ , really.

"Lance," Keith says, shaping the syllable around his lips carefully with a tiny smirk, and Lance quickly snatches his hand away, as though Keith is glazed in red-hot sunlight.  
"How– how do you know my  _name_?!" he screeches, flailing his arms around wildly and ready to run. He knew it, this is a fucking  _government_  ploy and they’re just trying to jail the kids who don’t conform to society and trespass in illegal areas, and-  
"It says so on your ring," Keith points out in a deadpan, and Lance inanely glances down at his hand, the gold band around his middle finger indeed inscribed with _"L-A-N-C-E"_ as an old gift from his mother before he had moved out.  
“…Oh. _Oh_."  
"Anyway, as I said, I'm- um- here to explore, and do some research, and I'm guessing you don't plan to help me, so I should be off. I'm staying here a long time, but I don't want to waste any second, so... bye, I guess? Farewell. Salutations. Goodbye darkness, my old friend. Whatever you typically say before walking off."

Keith  _is_  about to walk off and rashly try to find his way out like they're not in a secluded region, and Lance  _knows_  that this is dangerous and stupid and probably something he'll regret with every fibre of his being, but his instincts are  _screaming_  at him to  _help_  this boy- help him really just because he needs some support and might not survive on his own in a strange place, help him because he's an  _alien_  and God knows all Lance has ever,  _ever_  fucking desired has been to prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life and show the world how capable he can be and  _befriend_  an alien, goddamn it, go on adventures with him and have fun and-

" _Wait!_ " Lance bellows, and Keith pivots around with all the grace of a ballerina, expression guarded but brittle as porcelain, as though another loud noise will shatter him into a million shards of stained-glass fragility.  
"I  _can_  actually help you, for as long as you need me, I guess," Lance says, softly, and Keith's face brightens all at once, lighting up like flowers freshly bloomed. “ _Really_?"  
"Really," Lance confirms, and the tentative grin that spreads across this strange boy's face is enough to tug at his heartstrings and keep him going, for now.  
"But first, I kinda think we need to help you appear a little more _human_ first, if you’re gonna be staying here. I live alone, so you can join me for a while if you're lowkey, I guess? And we can figure out where you go from there onwards-"

"Thank you, Lance," Keith interrupts earnestly, and his tone is so sincere that all of a sudden, Lance can imagine that this _is_ all going to be worth it. They stand and regard each other for a moment as the first few stars begin to sink into the celestial backdrop alluringly- a tall, sun-kissed human and a crystalline, moon-bright space traveller, face to face, neck and neck- and then, Lance squints and gestures for this alien boy to follow, grabbing his previously discarded bag and beginning to stride away.  
  
"Come on, then, what are you waiting for?"

**vii.  
**

If someone had told Lance five years ago that he'd casually meet an alien on a beach and invite him to live in his house five minutes later, he'd have laughed in exasperated disbelief, despite being a pretty open-minded guy and  _believing_  in the unknown. So now that he's actually on a train with one, he's slightly taken aback at just how  _present_  Keith is, how _clearly_  he’s not a stress-induced figment of his tired imagination judging by the scowls they’re getting.

Lance had bought Keith a travel ticket and he’s turning it over and over in his white hands now, fascinated by the text and the feeling of how it slips through his fingers like sheets of snowflakes. The ambient noise of the train is fading away like fireworks in the background, and Lance can feel all the train-goers' beady eyes glued on the two of them, rock-solid businessmen and troubled soccer moms embracing their kids over-dramatically to protect them from the strange pair.

Lance is kind of accustomed to all this, anyhow. Where he lives is majority-white and mostly brimming with radical supremacists these days, so the very sight of his brown self must be unsettling to others- his caramel-golden skin, his blue sparkly backpack, his shiny nail polish, the minimal mascara and highlight he likes to wear to accentuate his features. It's deemed kind of unnatural, here, which sucks to the core, but he can usually deal with it all and ignore the audible judgements when he’s with his similar friends. Paired with Keith, though, who certainly passes as physically human but still super  _abnormal_  with long, glossy black curls and iridescent eyes and a black-plated spacesuit that disgustingly resembles fucking _cosplay_ armour- it's no wonder that they're getting intense glowers from all around, but  _hey_ , at least Keith doesn't seem as unsettled or uncomfortable because of it.

That is, until he decides it’s a good idea to communicate with Lance at full volume, way too booming on a hushed train where everyone from four carriages down can hear conversations.  
"Do humans  _always_  stare and try to make you feel uncomfortable?" he inquires innocently, and Lance is powerless as he stiffly shakes his head with a sharp, pointed grimace-  _shut the hell up, man! You're giving us away!_

(He urgently hopes that Keith's alien powers extend to telepathy as well, so he can hear all the insults he's hurling at the piece of shit in his mind).

"Foreign," Lance announces by means of an explanation to the looming, elderly businessman seated in front of them, who seems like he wants to get off at the nearest stop and call the police or something. Keith blinks in acknowledgement, trying to go along with Lance's excuses gratefully. However, time stops as the other comments being made on the train suddenly become distinguishable to his ears.  
  
"Foreign just like _you_ ," he hears a woman spit maliciously under her breath somewhere, and he groans deeply, never having gotten used to being verbally denigrated in public spaces. Keith looks disturbed, and somewhat concerned. Lance just shakes his head, and silently wills the eleven stops to his apartment to come _quicker_ , wishes he could bend and curve and slide down a slope of space-time far,  _far_  away from the racists and xenophobes lounging around in plain sight here.

He visualises the geometry of it all, tries not to remember the classes he's surely going to skip for Keith and how behind he is in everything, and his heart shrivels up a little in his chest at the prospect of what’s going on right now. It’s true: he really  _has_  casually met an alien on the beach and invited him to live in his house, and he really  _is_  on a train with him after promising to help the dude do some research on his planet to probably take back to an alien king and report how best to decimate the entirety of Earth. Probably.  
  
_Great, just great_ , Lance yells at himself in his head.   _And, how exactly are you planning to tell Hunk and Pidge about this?!_

He grumbles once again. It’s going to be a long journey.

**viii.**

It's late when the two of them reach Lance's tenth-floor, cramped but cosy little apartment, and Keith collapses instantly by the time he reaches the ripped-denim couch without a single word.  _He must be tired from lengthy space travel_ , Lance tries to reason with himself. _It's okay._

Honestly, though, reason in fact doesn't come into play at  _all_  here and Lance  _gets_  that he may be writing his own death wish by housing an alien, but he's so damn exhausted from studying and being crashed into by apparent alien spaceships all day that he just wants to  _sleep_ - so he decides that he _will_ after all, albeit just a small way away from Keith, so if he tries to murder him in his sleep or something he'll be able to hear him coming. It's a bit childish and juvenile, Lance supposes with a sigh, but so is going to sleep with a complete and utter  _stranger_  nearby, and he's still doing that.  
  
_I'll talk to him in the morning and get a proper grip on what's going on then_ , he decides firmly, driven and determined that if he's actually going to go along with such a spontaneous event, he might as well do it with some style and ease.  _This poor alien kid won't know what hit him._

Before he forfeits his responsibilities and scrolls through memes in bed, however, he knows he needs to get a blanket for Keith, so he fetches a quilt from the storage cupboard (embroidered with the Cuban flag, thanks to his mother) in zero-time and lays it over the curled-up alien boy sleeping soundly on his sofa, so tightly coiled that he sort of looks like a cat.

He also looks very, _very_ small and rather exposed right now, so Lance takes the time to note the key things about this guy: his skin is delicate, translucent to the lavender-soft veins winding like vines beneath the surface, lattices of sinewy blue on shadowed eyelids like lost half-dreams and lips as chapped and dry as any other stressed college student's. For someone who didn't understand any better, Keith would probably just appear to be some Korean-looking exchange student kind of boy, not an interstellar voyager who's soared his way across an entire _universe_ as opposed to a couple of continents. Lance wonders what kind of planet he'd lived on, and then apprehensively ponders over whether he could be an alien prince who'd wake to find a smelly college apartment a lot more underwhelming than a star-bright, crystal-laced, twinkling palace bedroom; but in the end, it doesn't literally matter because at least Lance has been good enough to give him free rent, anyway. Never mind how messy and disorganised and cheap his house may be.

In spite of this, he studies and evaluates their current setting, out of paranoia or fear of judgement from an alien or  _what_ , Lance doesn't know. What he  _does_  know is that his flat manifests itself like something out of a very low-budget paranormal exploration show, with roughly stitched together tiles and peeling, star-drained wallpaper; rough oranges and pinks filter in through thin curtains from the buildings opposite, and these last colours of the day feel like rosette pouring into the spaces between Lance's fingertips, chaste and carnivorous and featherlight. He closes his eyelids because it's not much, but it's home; and this strange boy on his couch has to accept that if they're going to get anywhere, even if he's plausibly alien royalty or whatever.

Lance bends down and tucks some of Keith's hair behind his ear, whose chest flutters upwards gently with the Cuban flag vivid on his neck still, a strangely poignant but undeniably beautiful image. Then, yawning, Lance goes to settle on his armchair to sleep, wondering how things will be when he wakes up and sees Keith again for the first time in daylight.

 _Alien_.

 **ix.**    
  
Still, for some reason it doesn't come as a surprise that when he wakes up, Keith isn't there anymore. 

 _Of course.  
  
_ Lance feels a certain assail of melancholy as he has an epiphany of absence, like a delicate-bright paperweight drenched in tears has simmered into his veins and sunken his heart; there's a loneliness in inventing alien figures in his head and even dreaming up a train ride back home, he realises, and silently reminds himself to call Hunk and Pidge over to drag himself out of his mind brimming with too-many hallucinations.  _If he was just a dream, I could've given him a better name at the very least!_ Lance taunts himself.  _Keith? Really? Where did that even_ come _from?  
  
_ The couch still indeed looks rumpled as though someone truly  _had_  slept on it, but Lance knows now that it's been empty and deserted all night long, like it is always. A shame, really.

For a while, he just lays his head down on the armchair and exists, eyes fluttering open and closed as he wills the musty room to spin in kaleidoscopic swirls around him with nothing but his fingertips pressed against ivory silk to ground himself in place. His body is at absolute zero and nothing is real, nothing matters and the dawn sun hasn't yet set the tenth floor alight and he doesn’t have anywhere to be, not for a while, not like this. Seven in the morning stabs at the marble of his spine like a briar rose. Hunger pools like acid in his stomach, and so Lance wills himself to forget those awful self-doubtful thoughts and tales of an alien boy he's made up in his head, and moves.

Rolling off the understuffed seat by stretching languid with creaking bones, he breathes in motes of dust while fixing the armchair cushion he’d slept on with fumbling fingertips. He feels distant and disarranged somehow, all shattered melodies and broken mosaics as he walks down to the kitchen with a chasmal chest and hemic eyes, and inspects it like it's brand new on this morning again- it looks as if a TV screen's exploded against half the tiles painted incandescent orange, teacups hanging off coat-hangers nailed into the drywall. It could be something out of a fairy tale if it wasn’t for the fact that all the cupboards are strewn open and ceramic coffee mugs pile into half of the two-bowl sink while potted cacti fill the other half, and Lance is silently grateful that Keith was just a daydream after all, because surely seeing such a mess would've put him off Earth anyway.

"Lance?"  
  
Lance _shrieks_.  
  
Okay, so maybe Keith  _wasn't_  a daydream and he had just made some early-morning assumptions after not seeing him as soon as he'd woken up; and he jumps practically out of his skin when he hears that mellifluous voice call his name again, soundlessly begging his pulse to stop beating like a river current down his chest as he gawks up.

Keith is _real_.

He's standing on Lance's balcony, still in his spacesuit, surrounded by all the wilting plants that Lance had grown at the beginning of spring to encourage himself to revise. It uncannily parallels the scene from yesterday evening when he'd emerged from the silvery-soft rocket threaded with glowing alien greenery, and Lance jumps into hyper speed once again as he grabs a coffee mug and begins to pour a bowl of off-brand cereal and milk inside of it, ignoring the echoes of  _he's an alien he's an alien he's a real life fucking alien_   _all your dreams have come true_  ricocheting around his brain with a sense of reality and hardness now.

"Hi, Keith!" he practically howls out of nervousness as he eagerly bounds into the balcony, nearly stumbling over when his foot catches the glass door separating the kitchen from the outside. The milk and cereal wobbles around precariously in the cup but he thrusts it into the alien boy's hands anyway, fixing him with his biggest, most exuberant, most heart-dashing grin as a friendly, diplomatic, good-citizen-of-the-Earth gesture.  _Go, Lance.  
_ "So, I've decided because it's really weird and hard to think of you as an alien, I'm gonna just be pretending you're a traveller from across the world that I befriended and am showing around for a while. Is that okay?" Lance says, words racing and fusing into each other so it sounds more like  _izthaokeh_?

Astutely, Keith nods, but his gaze is sharp on the cereal, scrutinising it with some hesitation. "Uh, not to be rude, but aren't mugs meant for tea or coffee, not wheat particles suspended in lactose solution?"  
"Oh my god," Lance can't help but let out a small snigger at that comment, to which Keith is a tad offended, his brows furrowing in confusion.  
"You're funny, man! Just drink the cereal and don't question my ways because I'm the genius here, okay? This is how you're going to fit in with human society in no time!"  
Keith takes a sip and mumbles, "I wasn't really planning on fitting in down here anyway. I just want to see some cool places with help from you, and- um- leave after conducting the research, I guess. Is that- is that okay?"  
"Of course, Korean exchange student who totally isn't an alien!" Lance bellows, to which Keith looks bewildered, "I'll show you the land of the free, so you can go back to Seoul and tell all your friends and family!"  
"Just friends, actually," Keith mutters shortly, but Lance is already doing a full spin having gained his energy for the day, his arms outstretched all around him as he pirouettes.  
"Cool places, you say? I mean, ideally I should probably go report you to the government and become a billionaire for extra-terrestrial discovery, but I won't. So let's start here. My balcony is the coolest place on all of Planet Earth."  
"Is that so?" Keith teases, having warmed to the cereal so he's gulping it down twice a second now. He wipes his milk moustache with the back of his hand and sets the mug down on the floor, looking around.  
"I mean, I was taking a peek before you woke up and followed me, and it is... well, _different_ \- but cool, ish. None of these are bio _luminescent_  though, are they?"

Lance may not have any plants that cast sparkling golden illumes, but he's still pretty proud of his balcony situation, white picket soaked in forest-greens and viridian and bursts of colour from overgrown ivy and potted anemones, caspias, roses, flora that he sure as heck doesn’t know the actual names of. He continues to lounge idly near the doorway and watches the way the terrariums hanging from the ceiling shift back and forth and make shadows against Keith, whose fingertips are now buried with soil as he regards Lance with eyes like solar systems and a dishevelled grin.

For a moment, it's not 7am and the solar flares spilled across the sky like egg yolk  _aren't_  bathing them in liquescent sunshine, and Keith is suddenly not an alien but a new, eccentric friend. He's got a smile made of atrophy and midnight and mystery, and Lance can't help but look and wonder what kind of love this new friend believes in and if he’s ever just sat on his roof light-years away counting stars and satellites, or if he merely exists caught between a daydream and the end of time.

“When did you make this?" Keith suddenly queries, tugging on a sheet of paper stapled to a potted plant and handing it to Lance. He fiddles with the bottom of his shirt like he’s guilty, and the paper makes Lance blink twice, a wave of nostalgia flooding him.  
  
_Things to Do with an Alien_ , it reads, in a messy, prepubescent scrawl.

"Irony is the deadliest killer," Lance laughs, and hands it back to Keith. "Take a look at it yourself; I never thought I'd be able to actually put this list to use! I wrote it when I was, like, thirteen, but everyone thought it was super silly. If only they could see me now, I swear..."  
"If only," Keith repeats steadily, and he seems amused by the list as Lance braces himself for yet another case of his antics being turned into a laughing stock, this time by a fucking  _alien_  himself. It doesn't come, though, thankfully.  
"But hey, this- isn't silly, maybe you could use it as a loose guide for showing me around or something? It seems helpful, y'know... maybe..."  
"Oh, you're right!" Lance gushes, and grabs it once again with newfound giddiness.  
"Like, three quarters of the things on here aren't possible or stopped being possible a while ago, but we can still do some things if they're not  _too_  silly, I guess-"  
"-I already  _said_  they're not silly, Lance-"  
"You seem really at ease with these plants around, in any case! Why's that?" Lance interjects quickly, changing the subject. He doesn't want to let loose the internal conflicts and mountains upon mountains of negativity that've been drilled into him to someone who's basically a stranger right now, all  _you're a dreamer, Lance, but none of these dreams will ever work out- you know that, right?_

Keith doesn't comment on it and simply goes along with what Lance is saying, fingers trailing along the marigolds curling past the edges of tables, reaching up and faintly touching one of the terrariums hanging down from the ceiling.  
“My mother really loved plants," he says, but he's speaking in a monotone, and his irises are glassy and blank. "We had a lot where we lived, not just the glowing ones but all sorts- ones that were sentient and could move, ones that would grow for a day and then crumble to dust, ones that could be tied to the souls of our people and keep them living a while longer. It was nice, to be honest. I didn't really ever consider that I wouldn't find the same things in different galaxies, but I guess that's what happens when you get used to something for too long. It's more surprising when it's gone." 

Lance doesn't recognise _why_ , but he's come closer to Keith and his fingers ghost over the boy's palm, curious but gentle.  
"That sounds amazing, man, I  _love_  how different your planet sounds- you know, diversity, and all that!" Lance exclaims, flashing him a grin.  
"How come your mama didn't come with you all the way here, then?”  
“She died a couple weeks ago," Keith says, but there isn't veritably anything much in his voice anymore. It's quiet. Lance can barely hear him, only the dawn birds drifting in the morning breeze.  
And he... he feels  _terrible_.

“I’m sorry,  _God…_  that was really shitty of me to ask, I should've figured it out-"  
"Don't be," he answers, but there’s a fault line between their fingers now; break and shudder and _gone_ , and Keith withdraws them quickly, looking at Lance.  
"Seriously, it's fine- without that happening, I wouldn't have been able to journey all the way  _here_ ," he informs Lance, and his mouth quirks upwards faintly.  
"Besides, I like it here on Earth already; it's a lot warmer than where I'm from. And the people are nice, too, from what I can see."  
"You've only met me, though," Lance points out with a snicker, and Keith fixes him with a sarcastic eye roll.  
"Uh-huh, your point is?"  
"Oh _. Oh_ ," Lance realises, and a flush spreads through his cheeks and down his neck.  _What a smooth talker this alien is.  
_ "Yeah, of course,  _uh_ \- yeah, you're gonna love it even more when I show you around, there's a  _lot_  more to this place than just my sad excuse of a balcony conservatory!" he beams, determined to brighten the mood and show this  _alien_  the better things in life- not just dwell on long-gone phantoms of mothers, imbued into every flower and every pot of dirt Keith will encounter for a while, no doubt.

"Let's go freshen up, and I can call in sick for college. Don't worry, it's not a problem, I do it all the time for enough study leave anyway-" he hastily adds when Keith switches into consternation, as though he's about to tell Lance  _no, it's okay, I can drag my sad alien ass around this polluted planet myself and see all the sights alone, that's totally fine by me-  
_ "I've also got to teach you some etiquette, because  _please_  and   _thank you_  isn't gonna cut it, no matter what your research tells you," Lance laughs, a little sardonically.  
"It was probably out-dated, because the general rule nowadays is if you don't  _look_  like the majority of people, you shut up and use an inside voice on the train. And you look East Asian-ish, even if you're from across the universe-" Lance explains, picking up the mug and beckoning for Keith to follow him, "- so you have to keep hush like me; but first, Mr. Alien, we've got to get you out of this skin-tight spandex spacesuit, or whatever it is. You look like a walking advertisement for a kinky adult shop, or something! It's a fashion catastrophe!"  
"Kinky? What? What's fashion?" Keith wonders out loud (quite fittingly), and he radiates such perplexity that Lance doesn't catch on if he's making a joke or if he's being serious.  
"Uh, it’s what you  _clearly_  don't have any taste in- duh,” Lance quips back, leading him out of the kitchen and down the twisting, darkened hallway.  
"You really need a  _serious_  makeover if we're going to go anywhere in public! Then we can look over the bucket list, and you can pick the first thing we do. Deal?"  
"Deal," Keith affirms, as Lance pulls him into his bedroom. Foreseeably, he looks overwhelmed.

 **x.**  

"When I told you to pick some clothes you liked from my wardrobe, I didn't mean pick the edgy, too-small emo stuff I bought when I was _twelve_ , okay?" Lance groans with a flourish, leaning back on his seat as he stares distastefully at Keith- who continues to look like an utter fashion catastrophe, just slightly less...  _explicit_.  
"Why do you do this to yourself, you poor alien child?"

They're sitting on a self-driving bus after Keith had, from Lance's bucket list, decided to  _"get on a random bus without knowing where we're going, and only get off at the destination, wherever that may be!"_. It's pretty deserted to Lance's relief, with the exception of a teenage girl wailing loudly at the back (probably from a break-up) and a snoring pensioner at the front. Keith, the animal, has propped his legs up on the seat in front of them because his research clearly didn't extend to more than just basic politeness, and he seems very smug in his new get-up, a lot snarkier than when he'd been in his shiny suit.

"There's nothing wrong with my clothes, and you said I could wear anything. Plus, it was in  _your_  wardrobe anyway, so it's your fault," Keith announces, and smirks at Lance like he's just made a sick burn. Sadly, it's hard to take him seriously in a cropped (cropped! Cropped! Fucking  _cropped!_ ) red leather jacket, and black jeggings  _(JEGGINGS!)_  tight around his legs with an abominable pair of red-and-white boots Lance didn't even know he owned.   _Was I drunk when I bought those? What the fuck, Lance? Have some shame, ain't no boots like that gonna make your Mama proud!_

"Okay, but that doesn't change the fact that you look  _STUUUPID_ , mullet," Lance retorts, and gesticulates at himself, even though he doesn't look much better with a  _sequined_  backpack, today. "You need to take some tips from me,  _amigo_ , since my splendid, handsome looks get me  _all_  the ladies, trust me! And the gentlemen too, because I'm inclusive.  _And_  the aliens of course, if you will..."  
"Not the one you're talking to right now," Keith snorts, sticking his tongue out marginally, and Lance gasps in outrage, clutching his chest dramatically as though he's been shot by a razor-sharp bullet.  
"Okay, A- you finally admitted that you are actually ET, and B- how  _dare_  you, bitch?!"

It feels like they've known each other for years, with the easy banter they've been swapping for the hour they've been on this bus as it lumbers and swerves along the road, long past the city streets now and onto the red, dusty mountainsides of the country. Talking to Keith is easy, somehow, almost as easy as it is to talk to Hunk and Pidge despite the dude not even being from  _Earth_ , for god's sake. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that he's basically the living embodiment of what Lance has been searching for and trying to prove all his life, but since they'd gotten off on a slightly  _atypical_  foot (i.e. Lance socking Keith straight in the face), it's inevitable that they're already prone to arguing like old buddies. Still... the feeling of it settles over Lance like the taste of honey and snowflakes and all things sweet, a familiar sense of belonging he hasn't authentically felt since he moved out from his family home and embarked on the journey to adulthood and independence.  
  
_Contentment_ , Lance thinks.

_Contentment- that's what this is._

Another couple of hours pass on the bus as the girl and the pensioner get off and other passengers get on, blurs and blurs of faceless people who pay no mind to the boys curled up like miscreants on their seats; and they get off and more people get on, and Lance and Keith simply don't see them, not at all. Keith is hyper-focused with his hands cemented flat against the window the whole journey through, his eyes flitting from sight to sight as they pass gas stations, service stops, neon motels, and emerge from the dust into another state where the city buildings flicker to life and the people pulsate in and out like it's a cosmic heart contracting and pumping, pumping and contracting, contracting and pumping.  
"What's this?" he says at almost everything he seems enthralled by, and Lance feels fond as he sees the childlike enchantment in this alien boy and explains what everything is, all "that's a car park, Keith, where people park cars, funnily enough" and "that's the mall, where people buy clothes so they aren't fashion catastrophes like you".

By the time the hands of Lance's watch are kissing the number six, they've cleared a whole other state and scavenged some food from friendly teenagers who had been eating McDonalds- ("These ductile carbohydrates are pretty good, Lance-" "Fries, Keith,  _fries_...") - and now they're the only ones left on the bus, which seems to be nearing its destination.

"Your transportation is painfully slow," Keith remarks, which Lance gapes at, because they've been powering at 300 miles an hour on a hydrogen-powered bus that's  _insanely_  fast,  _especially_  when compared to a couple years back.  
"I don't know how rapid your buses were on Planet Whatever, Keith, but we respect people's rights to not throw up here!" Lance squawks in scandal, rolling his eyes, before looking out. They're passing through a country road again, all arenose yellow and fields of gold and hay, and Keith seems to enjoy this just as much as the cyberpunk city aesthetics.  
"Honestly, you knob, what was your planet even  _called_ , anyway-"  
"Uh, hey... Lance?" Keith interposes in the middle of his question uncertainly, concentrating straight ahead with a look of dismay and trepidation. Lance tips his head at an angle, annoyed at the interruption, but curious as to what could have warranted it.  
"What?"  
"Um, are we supposed to be heading straight for a mountain without a  _tunnel_  to go through?"

Dumbfounded, Lance checks out the view ahead and dear lord, Keith's right- only a short mile-or-so ahead are a row of pearlescent, crimson-stained mountains, daunting and towering and  _way too close_  for Lance's comfort- and this damned self-driving bus is still going at its full, incredibly intense three-hundred-miles-an-hour speed. His mind switches on erratically and all the damned orbital mechanics he's studied has him calculating the braking distance it'd take to halt if he slowed down the bus manually at  _this_  high of a velocity, but it's too much- way too much, and a lot longer than the distance there is to the mountains, so they'd inevitably crash which would drop their momentum to point zero in  _milliseconds_  and create an enormous, plausibly fucking  _fatal_  force on the two of them...  
  
"Keith, are you strong?!" Lance squeaks in a panic, shoving for him to get up despite continuing to be on a wild goddamn bus lurching from side to side violently. Keith is clearly confounded, but Lance has no time to explain.  
"Um, I _think_ so...?"  
"Do you trust me?!" he roars, and Keith nods vigorously as Lance stands up on the seat, gesturing for him to follow suit.  
"I need you to break this window for me," he pleads, bluntly, and Keith the damned  _alien_  doesn't even hesitate, as though breaking things on command is second nature to him, laced into his blood and soul like a reflex he can't get a hold of. He grapples furiously at the top of the window where it's secured to the rest of the bus and  _heaves_ , punches and punches and  _punches_  with barely-there grunts until the glass has cracks criss-crossing through it like spectral spider webs, shattering to the quick-moving ground beneath them as the bus hurtles on.

"What now?!" Keith yells, and Lance is utterly frozen, rooted to the spot because he  _doesn't fucking know_  and they're going to crash in t _en, nine, eight, seven_ , and the hopelessness must be rapt on his face because Keith notices and a dangerous but resolute expression settles over his features like liquid lava, and-  
"We're jumping out," he declares raggedly, and by the time Lance has screamed  _"WHAT?!"_  Keith’s got his arms wrapped tightly around the taller boy's torso and is edging towards the open window, his breath scalding-hot on the back of Lance's neck-

And, "Just shut up and  _trust_  me!" he shouts, voice rough as honey whiskey, and,  _and_ -

And they fall.  
  
Lance’s head feels like it's being crushed,  _pulverised_  by the crippling strike they take on the hardened, rocky desert ground and a thousand crows in his mind take flight all at once, all shifting densities as furiously beating wings thrash,  _palpitate_  against the span of his bruised skull. He can feel the adrenaline electrifying him from the inside, and Keith's arms are unwaveringly secure around his middle as they hurtle for what seems like a full minute before they come to a stop, their bodies almost completely parallel, the cushion of Keith's stomach and thighs protecting Lance from the jagged rocks on the earth.

"Oh my god," Lance whispers as he rolls away from Keith and studies him, strands of hair frenetically blowing in the wind, debris clinging to the skin that's been scraped stained-glass scarlet and infrared pain.  
"Are you…  _shit_ , dude, are you okay?!"  
Keith doesn't even _flinch_ at the drops of scarlet dusting his face like blood constellations, and stands without a fuss, coughing out sand and grit. "Yeah, I have a high pain tolerance, don't worry. Are you?"  
"Well, I think so, thanks to you basically taking the fall  _for_  me..." Lance mutters darkly- as always, he loathes it when other people have to put aside their own wellbeing to protect him.  
"But what the  _hell_  were you thinking, man? You're so damn impulsive! That would've _killed_ me if you weren't some alien with weird strength powers!"  
"Crashing into a mountain at 300 miles an hour would've killed you too, so you better be grateful for my impulses," Keith responds tartly, helping to clean Lance off and brushing the dirt away from his face impatiently.  
"Come _on_ , are you telling me you didn't find that fun?!"  
His expression betrays nothing, but Lance blinks at him, incredulous.  
_"Fun?"  
_ "Yeah, fun! You humans sure don't have any sense of adventure..." Keith begins to sigh, before Lance finally catches on to what he's trying to imply.  
" _Jesus_ , Keith, are you some sort of adrenaline junkie or something?!" he gasps.  
"Y- _yes_ , okay, it isn't weird, stop looking at me like... like that! And you are too, man, I can tell!" Keith bites back with a few stutters betraying the cast of indignation swept across his features, and Lance can't help the laughter that bubbles up inside of him again- it booms out across the deserted road they're stranded on, echoing throughout his body like a tequila sunrise, warmth igniting his bones.

All the problems, all the failures, all the unfinished work and deadlines and washed-out dreams fade to  _nothing_  what with this exhilaration he's somehow experiencing, stuck with an alien on the side of a cornfield instead of feeling slow and useless in an advanced college Math class. It feels like morning light filtering in through laced curtains; it feels like dawn, like dusk, like soft zephyrs and wind currents and sprays of sea salt all melding into one and scattering across his soul like rose petals, and he _loves_ it.

"I like adrenaline," Lance says unusually delicately, and something's been kindled inside of him as he surveys Keith straight in his liquid lilac irises and places his hands on the boy's shoulders, staring intently.  
"I like adrenaline, and I like adventure, and I am so fucking  _sick_  of wasting my time away feeling like a piece of shit. So let's go, Keith, let's go and goddamn  _kill_  ourselves if we have to, as long as we can  _feel_  something!"

Keith's hair is knotted and silky, smoking black like fire-blazed coals; his eyes are made of embers, skin glittering gold and pale sundust. His mouth stretches slowly, slowly into a fond smile, and it's hard not to see how- how  _visually pleasing_  this boy is, if Lance puts it as appropriately as he can in his head.

 _Fire.  
_ _Fire, fire, fire.  
_ _That's what he is._

"Come on, then, give me the best you've got," Keith rasps, his voice heavy and saturated with challenge, an animated smirk playing at his countenance.  
"Let's look around, see if there's anywhere worthwhile to be? Then we'll see if we can  _feel_  something, as you put it!"

His chuckle sounds as cosmic as a symphony, then, and Lance swallows, a lump the size of Neptune suspended in his throat.  _Fire_.

_Alright, time to start looking, then..._

**xi.**

The cliffside they'd almost crashed into ends up being an imposing kind of tall, towering above their heads intimidatingly, and yet also incredibly narrow: it only takes about five minutes to make the hike across the dusty, lachrymose path that eddies around it, and the silence that quivers between the two of them as they scale the diameter of the mountain is bizarrely comfortable. Lance usually isn't one for  _not_  taking up silences and filling them to the brim with idle, mindless chatter, but for some reason with Keith, it  _works_ \- the quiescence has a sense of utmost ease dissolved into it, somehow, as though Hunk's cuddles or the familiar smells of hot chocolate have melted into the air.

Once they've reached the other side, though, both their gazes settle upon a rusted, moss-golden shop sign sticking haphazardly out of the edge of the rocks in the distance, and they simultaneously whizz around to face one another and yell in commotion.  
"What's that?" Keith inquires breathlessly at the same time as Lance exclaims, " _Whoa_ , I've never seen that before, let's go explore!"- and they both stare at each other for a split second before spilling over into little giggles, like kids on an adventure. It's all a hilariously odd situation, really, which is why Lance is laughing- he's still with a real life goddamn  _alien_  who'd casually landed on his planet the evening before, and he's still skipping school to complete a bucket list he'd patched together as an adolescent, and he's still just found a random shop at the edge of a random cliffside that he'd almost randomly  _died_  on thanks to a random bus he'd mounted.

"Keith, this is the weirdest thing that's ever fucking happened to me, like,  _ever_ ," Lance decides to reiterate needlessly, and Keith just snorts, rolling his eyes.  
"Like, what the heck, you're an alien! From  _outer space_!"  
"We already established that, and you're an alien from outer space from my perspective  _too_ ," Keith puffs.  
"But! You've got, like, superpowers! You're way cooler than us boring old humans!"  
"I don't have superpowers, my strength is  _easily_  achievable by Homo sapiens by doing this thing called working out, not that you’ve ever tried it!"  
"Hey! I'll have you know that I  _do_  work out," Lance protests in outrage, "I did ballet, gymnastics, figure skating and swimming as a kid, and I still run to class every day! So  _there_!"  
"Why, are you always late?" Keith teases, and Lance huffs.

He doesn't want to be thinking about college of all things right now, so he changes the subject by flamboyantly half-slapping Keith and stepping in front of him, gazing with a dramatic contemplation beyond. Pointing vaguely in the direction of the hanging sign off the cliff side, he eyes Keith boldly.  
"So, do you wanna go there or  _what_ , alien boy?"  
"Yes. _Duh_. You're showing me all the cool places here, right? C'mon, I'll race you there," Keith instantaneously adds as a sadistic afterthought, and before Lance has even begun comprehending the sentence, he's off in a flurry of crushed dandelions beneath their feet; red, orange, caramel-golden particles of ash spiralling into the air like white noise, like smoke.  
"Show me what those late experiences have taught you!"  
" _WAIT!_   What the fuck, Keith, no fair, you had a head start!" Lance screeches, and launches after him so fast that he almost trips over his own feet. He hollers and yodels the entire run through to distract the other boy, who gives him the benefit of a tiny smile but ultimately remains one step ahead of him always, his steady inhales and exhales coming in short gasps by the end of the sprint. Lance's legs and stomach are sweltering with energy and lactic acid as they finally draw their journey to a close in front of the shop, and it kind of feels like there are burning baby dragons nestled in his abdomen, breathing fire and hammering against his chest as he attempts to take in oxygen.

"So," Keith pants, and it takes them both a full minute to recover from the stupid, utterly unnecessary race, gulping in air like it’s the plasma channelling through their veins, the taste of outer space and infinity.  
“I won. How’s that for an alien with superpowers?”  
“No,  _I_  won, you peasant!” Lance shouts and crosses his arms angrily, but Keith seems to have made up his mind already as he absentmindedly flicks him on his forehead, then inspects the sign. Lance’s eyes follow, squinting as he tries to decipher what it says.

Most of it is tarnished over with a rusting decay, but the ashen, lustreless cursive lettering remains, albeit faded. Its black spindly lines twist complicatedly, like a map of sorts, into what vaguely resembles the word...  
“Flora?” Keith says timidly, wringing his hands as he peers upwards with a defined furrow between his eyebrows-  _cute_ , Lance remarks in his head, before catching himself.  
"Flora, as in that term for flowers? _Again?”  
_ “I can’t see inside, so I don’t  _know_  what they are,” Lance says sarcastically, puffing.  
“Plus, why are you such a flower hater, man? You seemed to like my garden before! And what’s wrong with a flower shop?! They’re pretty!”  
“It doesn’t  _look_  like your pretty balcony though, Lance,” Keith says stonily, and gestures at the storefront.

The worst thing is, it's not as though Keith is wrong. The dilapidated store's windows are translucent and gauzy, but upon closer inspection, all they can see from outside are ethereal, gossamer threads of cobwebs snaking across the glass, dulling whatever’s in the background- for the time being, nothing except synergies of hazy forms and nebulous mist.  _Bummer_.  
“It might be pretty inside,” Lance points out deliberately, and Keith seems to catch on, suddenly determined to smash the window down.  
“Hey,  _wait,_  Keith- you know we can just open the door, right?”  
“Oh.  _Right._  Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t I know that?” Keith grunts, and shoves Lance out of the way, still opting to throw his body against the door as though it’s heavy.  
  
It’s not.

It cracks promptly.

“ _Keith_ ,” Lance groans, and Keith throws his arms up in surrender, sauntering in like he hadn’t just vandalised public- or even goddamn  _private_ \- property, which is what's most likely, because it’s on the side of a fucking  _mountain,_ for god’s sake. The boy’s _insane_.  
“Stop panicking, Lance, I got it open, didn’t I? Come on!” he calls out, and Lance follows him in apprehensively, a little anxious by how dim it is inside.

There’s a short passage that smells sort of musty and Lance _could_ swear he feels a few mice scurry across his feet-  _my trainers,_  he thinks brokenheartedly- but it doesn’t take very long at all till they reach the clearing of the store, and for the fourth, fifth, sixth, plausibly  _hundredth_  instance since he’d met Keith just yesterday, he’s rendered speechless.  
_“Holy shit,”_  he whispers, and Keith just ogles the greenhouse-like scenery spread before them like they’ve walked straight into an oil painting, his eyes filled with moonshine and astonishment.

It’s  _exquisite_. The cavern is void of a ceiling, but the walls climb staggeringly high, probably built straight into the cliff somehow; Lance peers up and notices a gaping fissure at the very top, chasmal and chatoyant, streaks of burning gold and blinding white light soaking through the crevices and suffusing this flower-shop-cave in a thousand shadows tinted all the colours of daybreak. Crystals glint on the four walls like smudges of starlight, overgrown lichen and moss threaded with withered flowers also diffused across the rocks; but most mesmeric of  _all_  is the very ground they’re standing on, crystalline as well. It’s deluged in a thin flood of water, lustrous and iridescent in the light breaking through the mountain’s cracks, but floating on top are tens and hundreds of wilted petal blossoms, barely visible in their dullness opposing the glistening chamber.

Lance cannot bring himself to break the beautiful silence, content with the melody of the rainwater’s currents. He’s never seen something so- so goddamn  _breathtaking_  on his own planet before, always submissive to his previous algid reality of glacial traffic lights, miasmic car horns, the frigidity and stillness of busy city life. Now, though,  he realises, now he could  _really_  get used to seeing such beauties, like  _he’s_  the alien exploring Earth and not Keith, like  _he’s_  the one stepping into these fizzy cinematic tomorrows and movie-reel sceneries, like he’s drifting somewhere beyond a daydream and the unfurlings of nature’s grandiosities. Lance has always believed in  _more_  and he’s always been looking up, up,  _up_  at the stars spangling the celestial sphere above him, but for once in his life, he finds himself awe-struck at what’s directly in front of him, enamoured with the earthen ground beneath his aching feet.

 _Here and here and here is an alien boy,_  his mind supplies to him helpfully,  _and a cave cast in golden light- and rainwater saturating the floor, and crystals stark-bright against the surface like stars. What more could a boy want?_

“Lance?” Keith murmurs faintly, words not aureate but precarious, as though they’re perched on the edge of a skyscraper above the sea. Lance bows his head to indicate he’s heard him, not bearing to let his annoying, over-the-top voice ruin the moment as it always does.  
“Wasn’t going to a flower shop and stealing flowers part of your bucket list?” he asks curiously, and Lance shivers. His mind numbs as memories begin to swirl deep within his mind, all the aching imprints of people who'd thought he was a  _waste of potential_  and  _God, you're ravaging your life away, Lance_  and that teacher, that one  _teacher_  who'd literally ripped apart his blood, sweat, and tears and laughed-  _"Stealing flowers won't be getting you anywhere in life, Lance. Or happen. With aliens. Ever."_

Keith must notice Lance's face falling like a thunderclap, because he fumbles and attempts to backtrack, but Lance is already saying, "No, no, it's okay. Stealing flowers from a shop  _was_  on my bucket list! Though, I must say, I _do_ think I was envisioning a shop where we'd actually get  _chased_  for stealing goods, not an abandoned one tucked away in the corner of a massive mountain thing..."  
"Authority is made-up anyway, Lance, so you'd best know I'd knock  _anyone_  out who'd chase us for stealing flowers," Keith says severely, and Lance shoots him an inquisitive look, surprised at the hostility heavy in his voice. Plaintively, Keith sighs.  
"Look, I just think it's wrong to want to punish two people trying to _live_ and find nice things to experience! I mean, there are actual  _bad_  things in the universe out there that need taking care of? And I know there's so many shitty things down here on Earth as well that the authority should be dealing with, instead of  _innocent people_ -" Keith mutters, kicking his foot and splashing some water carelessly, "-but  _still_ , I don't know, it's hard to think there's anything wrong on this planet, even if this place is just an exception. I mean, there was too much-  _way_  too much authority, back where I'm from. So, yeah. I wouldn't like them coming onto me. Just saying."  
There's something thick in Keith's tone, now, something which reeks sharply of acridness and disappointment, so Lance decides not to probe too much. He's here for helping the alien around Earth after all, not uncovering tragic and  _private_  backstories or something- and so he merely plasters his favourite million-watt grin on his face, and gently says, "Hey, Keith. It's okay. Should we start looking for flowers to steal and rebel against the made-up authority with, then?"  
"Why not?" Keith agrees bemusedly, and he wades towards the derelict, rustic-looking counter at the very edge of the cavern, where Lance supposes people used to bring their flower orders and bouquet arrangements before the place had just been... just been, well, left to  _decay_.

Lance doesn't really know what he's looking for. His bucket list had said all he'd needed was something extra-terrestrial and he's got that condition covered for  _sure_ , what with Keith by his side- but stealing flowers? What is he even  _supposed_  to do- pick up the goods and make a runner with all the dead flowers floating quietly in the raindrops? Lance gets that they emerge pretty, somehow, bobbing gently on the ripples of blue that reflect the earthshine and solar rays into the air, illuminating the motes of dust suspended there evermore. But something feels a bit wrong about just putting together a bouquet of deceased roses, tulips, daffodils, or daisies, because in the end they're  _dead_ , and...  
  
"Daisies!" Keith suddenly yells, and Lance jumps out of his skin, breath catching in his throat like a meteorite. He watches in alarm as Keith hoists himself up and swings behind the counter, crouching down to reach for something underneath it that Lance can't quite place. When he gets his head back over, he splutters and gasps like he'd ducked underwater, prompting a teasing but confused grin from him.  
"Too many eight-legged animals and lattice structures down there," he grumbles vindictively by means of an explanation, which would be absolutely  _hilarious_  if he wasn't so damn laidback and serious when saying things like that. Or maybe that  _is_  what makes it hilarious.

More importantly is what's clutched in his hand, however. Lance gapes at the fresh, living daisy Keith has somehow managed to uncover from between the cobwebs, an anomaly in this little pocket of the universe dotted with hundreds of dead flowers, petals worn beyond their time, evanescing greenery. It's small and transient and ephemeral clutched between Keith's fingertips, glowing almost like the astral flora that had decorated his spaceship the evening before; and the whites of the petals are tinged with pink on the edges, strange and eerie, but hauntingly empyreal.  
Lance comes closer and perches himself on the counter facing inwards, inspecting it carefully, this little piece of magic illuminated ivory and seeping into Keith's calloused palms.  
"How the heck did you manage to find  _tha-"_  Lance begins dubiously but he's interrupted by Keith, who takes one swift step forward and before he knows it, Lance can feel Keith's hands caressing his hair softly, pushing it out of the way to place the flower delicately behind his ear. He inhales the scent of daisies and fairydust and hesitation as Keith's fingers linger there for a moment and they lock eyes, an alien threading a flower into a human boy's hair- the most mundane and yet most spectacular of events probably  _ever_ , Lance dazedly thinks. Keith's cheeks are the colour of dusky roses, dusted with the finest pink imaginable, but Lance doesn't even get the chance to burn this image onto his mind forever when Keith quickly withdraws his hand and turns away, taking one last look at the cavern before they leave.

"That was a tradition where I'm from. The whole flower-behind-the-ear thing," Keith explains, shortly. He seems uncomfortable and on edge, somehow, probably not too accustomed to human contact- or, Lance suspects, contact in and of itself. It's okay. He understands.

"Thank you, Keith. We should go," he says sincerely to dispel the stilt in the atmosphere, and beckons at Keith to follow him outside, shoving himself over the counter and picking his way towards the passageway. When he's finally going down the darkness again, however, he turns to the mysterious silence he's left behind, void of Keith's footsteps.

Keith is idling there like a lost soul, gazing up into the scenery, a yearning for something  _more_  and something  _unreachable_  crystal-clear across his face. Patiently, Lance waits for the alien boy in the water, until their gazes meet again.  
  
Slowly, Keith smiles, and the yearning vanishes from his face, replaced by a contentment and placidity of sorts.

“Okay, Lance,” he says, softly.  
  
"Okay. Let's go."

**xii.**

It's seven 'o' clock and they've been trekking uphill for an hour since they discovered the little desolate shop, the grassy, carmine rocks of the mountains kind enough to acquiesce their weight and not crumble with every step they take. Now, though, the ground has flattened out and they've been walking in a straight line for a quite a while, Keith reading Lance's bucket list aloud and having each point explained to him with accompanying laughs and embarrassed groans from the other boy. What Lance doesn't expect to see a couple thousand yards into their flat-mountain-rock walk, however, is-  
"Is that one of those  _portable toilets_?" Keith asks innocuously, lowering the list caught snugly in his hands and pausing with apprehension.  
_"Lance?"  
  
_ It's actually  _not_  a portable toilet, in fact. Lance gawks at the almost perfectly-positioned, bewilderingly archaic VW van parked halfway up a cliffside for no apparent reason, cornflower blue with wheels coated in mud and the paint peeling to reveal foil-bright silver metal underneath; it glints like jewels and the flower shop crystals in the evening’s nectarine skylight, all ridges and spare tires tied to the roof with tawny-coloured rope. It's fucking  _fabulous.  
  
_ "Keith, that’s a _van_ , not a toilet," Lance breathes in wonder, but the alien seems underwhelmed. He can't believe it.  
"Listen, man, these are the _staples_ of old films and pre-nuclear war America! They're fucking  _gold!"_ he yells feverishly, and Keith just blinks.  
"Gold? But I thought this colour's blue?" he accosts, worriedly.  
"Figure of speech," Lance enlightens him, before launching into a series of more vociferous whooping, flapping his arms around over-zealously.  
"Keith, I've always wanted to drive a car all by myself! They only ever have self-driving ones around these days, because the Earth's so damn  _congested_. But if there's a rare van from, like, hundreds of years ago sparkling right in front of me, it would be stupid not to give into temptation, right? _Right?!"  
__"_ Is driving on your bucket list?" Keith queries, and Lance shakes his head dejectedly.  
"It's on my  _mental_  bucket list, though- I never thought I'd see an old vehicle that can actually be driven  _ever_  again, so you can't blame me!"  
"Let's do it then," Keith affirms, and slips his way over to the car, rapping at the door heatedly with his knuckles.  
"How does this open?"  
"Well, usually there's some keys to open it with, but the door might be open already if it's old and abandoned-" Lance starts, but before he can even finish his sentence _(again),_ Keith has bent down to retrieve a stone from the floor and is rearing his arm back with acute precision.  
As if he's about to throw it.  
"Wait, Keith, don’t!  _Keith!_  No, no, no,  _NO-"_

Too late. By the time Lance has rushed up to him, Keith has already released the rock with a fiery resolve in his curled fists, and the car window is splintering; bursting like ice into a thousand and one smithereens on the ground, fragments of fragility, speckled among the rocks like stained-glass fractures of poison and malice.  
"For heck's sake,  _Keith_ ," Lance wails as a shrill, discordant, distinguishably metallic car alarm begins to pierce through the air like a siren, probably alerting everyone in a ten-mile radius that  _yes,_ there are two boys illegally trespassing on the precipice of this range, plausibly about to steal a goddamn van that isn't even authorised to  _exist_  by the government anymore, let alone get driven _._

 _"_ Just... just  _get in!"_  he bellows and watches in despair as Keith tumbles through the ruined window and onto the passenger side, somehow  _not_  injuring himself on the knife-edged, salient rim left behind by the serrated glass.  
"Turn the keys next to the steering wheel!" he demands as he tries the door to the driver's seat and, unsurprisingly, finds that the car's doors had been unlocked anyway, negating the need for Keith to have been freakishly quixotic and caused the blood-curdling alarm to go off. Sliding in, he slams the door shut with a resounding  _thud,_  and the van's engines roar to life and creak as he hastily pushes for ignition; his foot is intent on the pedal as the massive vehicle jerks forwards, and he feels the first few tell-tale blooms of unease flowering across his heart.  
  
"Would this be a good time to mention that I've always  _wanted_  to drive, but don't actually know  _how_  to?"  
"Dear  _Cosmos_ , Lance! Move over a bit," Keith growls as he practically flings himself into Lance's lap in their shared panic and begins rapidly smashing buttons all over the cruise control, one hand on the paddle while the other guides Lance's white-hot knuckles against the steering wheel.  
"Don't move it so we can go straight! Good, now turn it left- no, not  _that_ much, go right again! The path's going uphill now, you're gonna have to press down on that pedal thing with a bit more force than you've got going at the moment-"  
"How do you, a goddamn freaking  _alien_ , know how to drive better than I do?" Lance hisses vehemently under his breath as he grudgingly follows Keith's instructions, recoiling at the excruciatingly loud alarm agonising his eardrums by the millisecond. Keith humbly shrugs, returning himself to his seat as Lance pretends that he  _can't_  feel the phantom pressure of the other boy's warmth against him, honey-like and electric over his thighs.  
"I had this, what do you call it, motorbike back on my planet? Her name was Red. She wasn't too different to how these vehicles function," he clarifies, nonchalantly. With a huff of disapproval, Lance shakes his head in disbelief as he steers on.

_So even this alien knows more than me, huh?_

To their  _enormous_  relief, the ear-splitting alarm automatically turns itself off after a few minutes of Lance’s mediocre, teetering excuse for a fun impromptu joyride in an antique van, and he can finally hear himself think.  
“Where do you want to go, then?” he seeks, as the diesel drones on and on, the same low hum that used to reverberate in his mind whenever he’d get cluster headaches.  _Not a good memory_ , he thinks, grimacing.  
“How about we continue going up till the top?” Keith suggests.

Lance does just that. It only takes about ten minutes and not much effort to reach the summit, and a serene, subdued stillness swells between the two of them for the duration of the journey, soothing and mellifluous like silky caramel covering Lance’s lips. He revels in it, the only sounds resonating between them being the hushed static of the van’s faulty radio system, the faint harmony of Keith’s rhapsodic breathing, the breathless euphony of the wind barrelling between Lance’s ribs as it washes in through the window. Then, when he parks at the circular altitude of the mountain and the two of them get out, there’s an unspoken trust that lingers between their hands as they examine the place, unsure as to where exactly they’ve arrived.

Haltingly, Keith squats down and inspects a dusty, iron-twined plaque on the ground, at the very base of the rounded apex they’ve found themselves on.  
“We’re on a volcanic crater, right now,” he elucidates as he reads off the placard, moons up at Lance. Then, all at once, mischief engulfs his visage as he smirks, suddenly playful.  
“Also- it’s  _out of bounds_ ,”  
“ _WOW_ , Keith, you shouldn’t have told me that! Now we’re totally staying in this place,” Lance hoots, and shoves him out of the way, sprinting down the raised edges of the crater with his arms in the air before launching wickedly into a somersault. They may be at the top of a volcano, Lance knows, but thanks to how much the people of the past had messed with Earth’s natural splendours, nothing much erupts in lava-torn displays of magnificence anymore.

Although it’s led to there being hardly  _anything_  organic around, nowadays- no lush, gold-studded circlets of leaves and ivy-wrapped branches of greenery, no rainforests sparkling with rays of sunlight, no fertile soil left behind by volcanic eruptions anymore- it  _does_  mean that they can lounge around on craters without fear, which he’s pretty sure was somewhere on his steadily dwindling bucket list. Number nine:  _camp out somewhere dangerous for a while where death is plausible,_ he recalls Keith reading out to him mere minutes ago, the two of them snorting at Lance's teenage self rich with death-obsessed angst and edginess. He doesn’t apprehend if it’s fate or just luck that he’s happened to find all these places and opportunities literally the day after befriending an alien, but he’ll take it over the droning tedium and ennui of college life  _any_  day.

“Sit down with me,” he calls to Keith, who joins him gladly at the far edge of the caldera. Beauty is woven into the very granite and basalt rocks peppering the ground, here, shifting beneath their feet like they’re tilting the earth on its axis completely; the crater has dried, lucent trails of lava undulating through it like rhyolite-red scars, passing afterthoughts amidst the lingering emeralds that drench the place in glassy constellations of long gone flames. Lance observes Keith as he seats himself with his feet dangling into the void, his hair stippled with rusted chartreuse and ochre gold needles like he’s the king of fire and topsoil and volcanic smoke. His alien-green veins trace along his skin like magma carving a path to sea, and Lance fondly accepts the fact that he's never seen anyone before who looks so at home in the aftermath of cataclysm- so goddamn  _right_  in the aftermath of cataclysm.

“What’s that?” Keith points into the sky, disturbing Lance’s train of thought, and his voice is low and rough and splintered around the edges, sewn into with star-bright stitches of catastrophe and chaos and disaster. Complacently, Lance charts out the imaginary lines connecting the tips of Keith’s fingers to whatever he’s indicating at, and it leads him to the setting sun.  
_Twenty-four hours since my life changed, huh?_

 “That’s the sun,” Lance tells him with a laugh, and at Keith’s still-mystified expression, expounds further.  
“It’s the name we give to the star that Earth orbits around every twenty-four hours. It’s pretty big, and pretty cool! Oh, and also pretty romantic to watch it setting with somebody else, so,  _y’know_ ,” he winks overdramatically, “I hope you’re in the mood,”  
“Oh-  _Helios_?” Keith probes, and Lance nods in confirmation.  
“Yes, that’s Helios,”  
“Did you say that people watch it setting when they have the time?”  
“Yeah,” Lance frowns at the excessive captivation vibrant in Keith’s irises, “Why?”  
“We had two stars to orbit around- two  _suns-_ back hom- I mean, back where I’m from,” he says, bringing his hands up to make O shapes around his eyelids so he can see the sky falling more clearly.  _Cute_ , Lance find himself thinking again.  
“They were hardly stars, y’know. Just white dwarfs- super dim, almost dead, probably not like the Sun you’ve got going on down here. I’ve never seen anything so bright…”  
“I know what a white dwarf is, Keith, I study astrophysics as a pathetic college degree,” Lance says defensively.  
“Really? That’s nice,” Keith hums, seemingly disinterested, hyper-focussed on the sprawling scenery before him.  
"I wasn’t allowed to watch the white dwarfs at the end of each astronomical cycle, y'know- each  _day_ , sorry. This is actually my first time. It’s nicer than those flowers so far, I have to admit..."  
“Wait, oh my god, are you hecking  _kidding_  me?!” Lance gasps in exaggerated horror (though he truthfully  _is_  horrified), feeling his stomach drop down all the way to his knees.  
“You’ve never seen a sunset before? Do you have  _any_  idea what you’ve been missing out on?!”  
Keith just shakes his head, still closely surveying their surroundings like it’s the most fascinating thing in the entire world (which, Lance figures groundbreakingly, for him it probably  _is_ ).  
“Well, I’m just gonna silently sit here and let you soak up all its beauty, man. You’re gonna want to stay here forever once you see it, I swear!"  
“Already want to stay,” he retorts quietly, and Lance softens, feeling a pang deep within him at those inexorably heartfelt, earnest words. He resolves to say nothing so that Keith can truly enjoy the sundown as it  _should_  be enjoyed- taken in, in all its majesty and blazing glory, by the firecracker eyes and candlelit soul of an alien boy from far, far away- and so he shuts up, and listens to the earth singing, and grips hard enough onto the volcano's ridge to make his knuckles whiten as they wait.

Slowly, slowly they watch as the orange sky ruptures and luminescent stripes of amber and tangerine electrocute the clouds, supernova-bright like fireworks wrapping around the monsoon in hazes of gold and warmth and oceandust. The sunset condenses into dripping embers and stitches of smouldering black forest fires, and Lance watches on in awe as the patchwork of flames and solar bursts seep into Keith's eyes, as hot as melted starshine. He wonders, briefly, if his fingertips would come away smudged with outer space if he reached out to brush his silvery-dark hair, or maybe if they'd come away charred to the bone. Scarily, he doesn't really think he minds. It'd be a blessing, a blasphemy either way.

"You like it?" he asks as the sky's dusky red gradient begins to clear. Keith's face is cast in a muted coral-reef pink as he ducks his head, not even sparing a glance at Lance, but he doesn't blame him; the sky's too skilled in its igneous, opaline seduction for anyone to look at anything else. He turns his head upwards again, breathing in the sugar-soaked twilight.  
"We can stay out here for a bit longer if you'd like. The sky's gonna darken pretty soon, we might be able to see a few stars-" Lance's voice catches, "- but I'm not too sure how visible they'll be, honestly. In areas like these it's either so polluted that you can't even see the black of night, or it's kinda, well, mediocre for stargazing..."  
"No, let's do it," Keith says bluntly, though not unpassionately. "I have lenses that I carry with me if my eyes begin to hurt. They might help if we're looking up,"  
"Lenses?"  
"Yeah, you put them in so you can see in different wavelengths. I only have radio-wave sensitive ones, because there was so much of it emanating from Earth, I thought it was how you guys perceived light. I guess I was wrong..."  
"Holy macaroni, what the  _heck_?! That's so freaking cool! Show me?" Lance exclaims, and Keith reaches into his (well, technically Lance's) old jacket, withdrawing what looks exactly like packaging of coloured contacts.  _Guess some things just don't change between planets..._

Keith unscrews the pink and blue lids carefully and the lenses indeed resemble ordinary contacts, just slightly thicker and shinier and glazed over with some sort of clear shade of aquamarine. He scoots a little closer to Lance and peels the contacts in half so there are somehow two pairs- one evidently unused, presumably his spares- and lifts them up, inspecting Lance closely.

"Here, give me your face," he demands, but doesn't even wait for Lance to move before he grabs his cheeks, concentrating intensely as he uses the quivering tips of his fingers to pop the lenses in. They feel cold and kind of bizarre against Lance's eyeballs, a little scratchy as though there's a few specks of irremovable dust trapped in them. He blinks, and the world comes into focus as Keith adorns himself too.  
"Well?" he says. "Are they okay?"  
"They're kind of gross, man, I can hear them scraping against my eyeballs every time I need to blink," Lance groans, tempted to rub them but opting to stretch out his dark under-eye bags by copious amounts instead.  
"Also, nothing's changed in my field of view- I thought I'd be able to see on the radio wave spectrum, or something?"  
"Humans might take some time to adjust," Keith nods, squinting straight up into the tear-stained clouds, "In my research before I came here, I learned that our bodies are pretty similar physically because we evolved the same way you did- but internally it's all kinda different. Our nervous systems are more sensitive and we're a little more attuned to our surroundings. Which is why we need these lenses a lot of the time to detect any possible, like, invisible radiation dangers, or stuff like that..."  
"Talk biology to me," Lance moans erotically, sniggering at the embarrassment that engulfs Keith's face in a flood of crimson.  
_Wow, I didn't know sex noises were universal across alien species as well..._

"No, but for real, biology scares me to the surface of last scattering and back, so please don't! I'm not into that stuff, even if it's really interesting. Like, I don't have enough energy- or capability and attention- to memorise and learn so much,"  
"You said you do astrophysics though, right? Isn't it harder?"  
"Aw, you remembered, Keith!" he coos, beaming at the alien boy in the descending phosphorescence of day, carving etches of charcoal and shadows across the hollows of his cheekbones, his paper-pale skin, his jawline that looks like it's been crafted out of fragile glass and snow.

"Yeah, I do astrophysics! It's the toughest thing and I kind of have a... like, condition... disorder...  _brain_  thing which makes it even harder, but it's all worth it. For the stars," he explains, scratching the back of his sheepishly.  
 "I always wanted to be, like, an astronaut as a kid, and I still do. I want to pilot a rocket to space! Honestly, you're everything I've ever wanted to be and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous of you,"  
"Why can't you be an astronaut, then?" Keith says with a troubled tone, his forehead creased like a paper bag. Lance exhales, gazing out into the tapestry of darkness that's draping over the empyrean, distilled blurs of grey and smoky pollution diluting its purity.  
"It's kind of long, man. I don't know how much you researched, but after the world's First Nuclear War- you know, the one which targeted people of colour and my ancestors in less developed countries- they de-funded NASA, because they supported nuclear power, but not nuclear  _war_! They were our space agency that'd help get people into interplanetary space, back before my  _abuelita_  was even born- hella cool, and hella gone to waste.  
Still, though, we  _have_  continued building rockets to send all the nuclear debris and radioactive waste to space, which is what my main man Hunk is studying to do- though I think he plans on shoving himself into one of his rockets one day, even if he gets motion sickness and throws up a lot! It's gross, but I love him. There's Pidge as well, she's a genius but no one really trusts computers and codes anymore, since they caused the whole nuclear fallout. And me- well, I just study the science behind it all."   
Lance hasn't spoken so much in days about something  _normal_ , only ever being capable of venting about the difficulties of college- and his throat is absolutely parched, but the way Keith is ogling him like he's strung up the entire universe makes it all worth it.  
  
"Why do you look so impressed?"  
"I'm not, I'm just surprised Earth has such a bad history when I was warming up to it. Better than my planet, though. And also, your subject sounds very cool. Aren't you going to tell me more?"  
"You want to know more?" Lance responds, baffled, and Keith just shrugs, leaning back on his hands to make himself comfortable.  
"Sure, I'm all ears."  
"What exactly do you want to learn?"  
"Well, what do you  _do_ , for starters? What are you aiming for? What's the end goal?"  
"Wow, you're making this sound like a job interview," Lance snorts, poking Keith in his chest. He feels solid, warm, grounded like the volcano they're seated on, as in tune with his natural instincts as the maps of lava interweaving beneath their dangling feet.

"Honestly, you're gonna laugh, but I've always been most interested in extra-terrestrial life. My ultimate aspiration was always to prove that aliens- or anything from outer space, really- exist, even just tiny little microbes! No one ever believed me and thought it was just stupid little Lance, overdramatic Lance, silly _comedic_ Lance. But hey- seems I was right  _after_  all,"  
"Yeah, I'm very much living and very much  _not_  from Earth," Keith jibes, amusedly.  
"Honestly, though, you know I could just hand you into the government, right? I'd get, like, a  _million_  bucks which would be great 'cause I'm broke right about now, and it'd probably bring justice to people of colour everywhere and show we're not just here to ruin the world, and probably get NASA up and running again, and save the universe-"  
He stops, abruptly, when he sees Keith's face. The boy's  _terrified_.  
"I'm joking though, Keith. I'd never report you like you're some rare, exotic object and not, like, a person or alien or whatever- I know how it feels. Plus, how would I ever complete my bucket list of stuff to do with an alien friend?"

Keith smiles, and they sit and simmer in Lance's last comment laced with characteristic affection for a while, before he speaks again, rounding his syllables wondrously.  
"Hey Lance, look up. Your lenses should be working by now."  
"Are they even  _real-_ " Lance begins sceptically, but is cut off by his own astonishment, almost jolted to the point where he's on the verge of wobbling, about to fall into the empty, bottomless crater; but Keith grabs onto him before he can, hoisting him back up.  
"Keith- holy  _fucking fuck_ , Keith,  _wow_..."

Because, because  _starlight_. Because Lance is a mere, mortal human being who usually can't see in anything but visible light _ever_ , and the sky's just grown blurrier and blurrier since he was a child, the last time he'd properly traced out the constellations being when he was camping as a five-year-old. But now,  _now_  this strange otherworldly boy has spun into his life like a hurricane, a whirlwind, an angel on  _fire_  and has given him a means of seeing the heavens in an unfamiliar way he's always wanted to perceive it in, on a completely different wavelength to what he's accustomed to, and it's.  _Transcendent_ , for lack of better words.

There aren't constellations. There are whole goddamn  _galaxies_. The empyrean above them is dusted, like a cosmic forest, with silver-soft stars spilled across every patch of the sky, dissolved roses adrift and lost in outer space. It's blue velvet, made of moonflowers and the taste of violet summer nights, and Lance- he's completely fucking  _drunk_  on it, the spirals of rainbow helium flares and spinning star systems soaked underneath moonlit clouds like secret kisses, love letters written in invisible ink from the universe to his eyes in this very moment.

"This is  _heaven_ , Keith, thank you so much," he whispers, swivelling to regard the boy sat next to him, but is- not unsurprisingly- blown away once more. The sky may be hypnotising, yes, but of course,  _of course_  an alien boy is going to just as heart-stopping, if not  _better_.

Over the course of the past day Lance has found himself staring at Keith's profile time and time again, completely and utterly absorbed by the hardened, delicate grace he puts across, channelling a certain feminine-masculine beauty in spite of his aggressive, slightly cold, entirely impulsive exterior. He looks a little like a marble-sculpted Greek statue, with high cheekbones and long lashes and freckles smattering his face like the cosmic forest in the sky; and yet, yet the radio wave vision magnifies it all by a hundred, a thousand goddamn levels of raw  _divinity_. His eyes are the metallic surface of the moon, not just violet violence but speckles of shining silver-gold ignited between the spokes of his irises. The cracks between his lips are lined with the same gemstone shades. His skin seems almost translucent, giving way to flickering, platinum-bright lanterns drenched iridescent beneath his bones.  
He's in total  _awe_.

"Keith, you're  _aglow,_ " Lance gapes and Keith just laughs, gesturing to the view in front of them, perched at the top of infinity on the highest point of a volcano.  
"So is everything else, Lance- it's all aglow,  _too_ , look," he says, one thin finger outstretched and drawing along the too-distant edges of the trees and barren desert land and crumbling buildings, decrepit and left to die. Little spheres of pulsing white light litter the whole region, no doubt the remnants of old nuclear explosions, like candlelit warnings.

It's something out of one of those old vintage superhero movies from NASA's epoch, Lance thinks, not quite as ancient as Star Wars but probably the generation directly after that; he remembers cuddling night after night in his  _Mama's_  arms, yelling at their tiny excuse of a satellite TV, enthralled by the special effects and clean-cut looks and sheer immensity of  _alien species_  in the films. He'd grown up to realise that life, in fact,  _wasn't_  as invigorating as his childhood fantasies would be, realised that the world was not a home but a battlefield. But now,  _now_  some dude from another goddamn planet is trying to prove to him that maybe, just maybe Earth isn't as ugly as he thinks. And even if it isn't entirely true, he's so damn grateful for it.

"Keith, I know you came here to see the beauties of Earth and all, but it isn't really anything special anymore," Lance admits, blowing gingerly into the crepuscule of the night.  
"Like, honestly, the places we've seen, the mountains- the flower shop cave- that van we stole, even this goddamn  _volcano_ \- they're so rare to come across these days, and it's just a coincidence that we happened upon them all at the same time. Everything else is a wild mess on our planet, believe me, and we've got only ourselves to blame for that,"  
"The atmosphere, though, Lance? Don't you think it's anything...  _special_?" Keith frowns, hailing the azure above with poorly-hidden exasperation. Refractorily, Lance takes in the sight of the skies and the air vibrating with faint, ghostly forms of auroral radio waves, disrupting the energy fields like riptides made of quivering particles. He can't help but nod that it  _is_  all quite splendid in a way he's never had the pleasure of experiencing, of course;  _but_ -  
"It's only lovely because you made it that way, Keith," Lance says, shutting his eyelids tight to stop their stinging.  
"I mean, without lenses, it's just a vision of the night sky that I've seen a thousand times before, and the washed-out, devoid land that's been rotting away for a hundred years now. You brought your alien tech to see Earth in a new light, sure, but for what? All I see is our planet's shitty past, and the consequences of the biggest mistakes we've ever made!"  
He gesticulates at the scintillating relics of radioactive material buried deep underneath the ground wildly, shreds of decaying plutonium and uranium like footprints of the billions of citizens they- or, well, the people of the  _past-_  had killed.  
"Just because something isn't beautiful on the surface, doesn't mean it isn't beautiful at all," Keith says quietly with a wrinkle between his brows, some sort of retort. His eyes are alight, dancing with the tendrils of a fire Lance can't quite identify.  
"See, there's places like  _my_  planet where it's all kind of ugly environment-wise  _and_  people-wise, so I can't help but like all this. You've got lovely  _people_  here, at the very least," he remarks earnestly, and Lance exhales his agitation, knowing Keith's right.

He probably came from a profoundly shitty place if he's on a mission to bother sailing through the entire goddamn  _universe_  for an experience of its beauties, and besides, Earth is...  _okay,_  Lance supposes. Even if he feels like he could split it open with a sword right down the middle, and it'd sever completely in spills of rustic gold, jellyfish spines, bloody warriors painted crimson and glorious nuclear bombs and explosions of serpentine sparks and sirens. It's still-  _okay,_  despite the millenniums of violence and disorder and aching bloodshed. They're still getting by, right?

The two of them let the heaviness fused into the air bubble between their bodies for a while, placid but peaceful, before Keith perks up and points into the duskiness. Lance tracks the path he carves into the azure attentively.  
"That's the place where I'm from, if you look really carefully," he says. Lance stills, hearing his pulse roaring in his ears and barrelling between his lungs, like seashells.  
"It looks like every other galactic system in the sky, right? The only difference is that you can see our faint signals, because all the other galaxies you can see from here aren't actually inhabited. But I'd rather have gone somewhere uninhabitable than stayed on that shithole of a planet. So I hope my affinity for Earth makes at least  _some_  sort of sense."

Lance stays mute, feeling the heat and frustration radiating from Keith's slightly quivering body, and simply stares up at the swirling, faint vortex of bruised gold and jade that is Keith's first home. It's a symphony of faux grace, a melody of euphonious chaos, yellow shards of refulgence papering like glass and sunspots against its blazing centre; but Lance knows now, for whatever reason, that it was a cruel place, maybe one he doesn't grasp the exact details of but if it made this beautiful alien boy unhappy, it's shitty enough to deserve his utmost loathing anyway. He hates how it spins, hates how it reflects every rainbow colour of the spectrum, hates how the translucent white vibrations he can see diffracts out of it in signals of otherworldly life-

"Wait, Keith. Did you say  _SIGNALS?"_  Lance gasps suddenly, making the other jump and grip onto his own shoulders in freezing shock.  
"Uh, yes?"  
" _OH MY GOD, KEITH, THAT'S FUCKING AMAZING! YOU'RE A HECKING GENIUS!_ _"_ Lance screeches and flails about wildly as Keith blankly watches, scratching his head. He's completely clueless as to the things running through Lance's mind right now.  
"What? But... I didn't do anything?"  
"Keith, these signals- these  _lenses_  you've brought to even know _where_ the signals are- they're not found anywhere on Earth, which obviously means that this is a patch of the sky no one's ever properly scanned before- or at least used the right _equipment_ to scan!" he gushes, waving his arms at the empyrean with adrenaline rushing through his body like entire oceans dissolved in liquefied bliss and wonder.  
  
"That means- that means since I can  _see where the signals are coming from_ , I can measure what kind they are and set up specialist equipment from the research hub at my college to detect their frequencies, all because I know  _exactly_  where to look! And then,  _oh my fucking Jesus_ , Keith, and then I can compare the data side-by-side with ones on Earth, and it'll probably bear some sort of similarity that shows the transmissions can't come from anything but intelligent, carbon-based life, and-  _OH MY GOD_ , Keith, I fucking love you right now, I'll finally be able to prove alien existence in a mediocre little college dissertation because of  _you!"_

After Lance's little- okay,  _huge_  outburst- Keith seems lost for words, but beams in a show of star-white teeth and crinkled, sunshine eyes. The wind itself holds its breath as he takes Lance's hand in his to encourage him, and peers up fondly.  
"I'm gonna make you work on this  _with_  me, Keith. It'll be so much fun, okay, I swear doing physics is probably another rare beauty on this planet," Lance says, and his smile is audible in his words. Keith merely grins a little wider, squeezing his hand as he watches the way the shooting stars dance and cartwheel in the other's gaze. He improvises, awkwardly.  
"I- I'm glad I could be of some sort of help, Lance," he says. His entire visage twinkles.  
"Yeah," Lance murmurs, ears stained russet-red as his eyebrows raise in fondness and joy, too.  
"Yeah, Keith. I'm glad as well. We'll definitely make a good team."

**xiii.**

After discussing the alien-detection ideas for a little longer on the caldera, they head down the flat mountainside and back onto the road again, the headlights piercing through the eventide like bugs' eyes and illuminating the path ahead. Lance had quickly realised, after seeing the hazy red flicker of the van's dashboard timestamp-  _2:15am_ \- that it was  _way_  too late to make a long-ass ride across entire  _states_  to his hometown, not to mention dangerous as  _heck_. It'd probably take hours upon hours to get back, and he knows he's pretty shitty when it comes to roadside navigation in self-driven vehicles, let alone manual ones. All in all, he really isn't up for crashing a van that isn't even  _his_  with an alien inside,  _especially_  since he's never properly had driving lessons and all. It'd definitely be safer to catch another hydrogen bus the next day, and furiously hope that it wouldn't be one on a crash course.

That's basically the main reason he finds himself soon pulling up next to a vibrant, vividly archaic building that looks like it’s straight out of the past, drenched in wisteria and creeping vines and the scent of diluted lust and heartache.  
"This is where people can stay when it's too late to get home overnight safely, Keith. It's called a motel," Lance explains with his chin tilted upwards in hubristic pride, almost  _too_  firmly.  
"Yeah, I figured," Keith snorts, gesturing at the building's front. The glaring, neon-bathed sign that spells out  _24/7_   _MOTEL_  winks in a flash of broken lamps at Lance cheekily.

See, it's not like he  _doesn't_  get the idea that dingy, suspicious motel stays past 2am is the perfect way to be taken out by a serial killer, but Lance is  _sleepy_ ; and besides, he's always found something a touch surrealistic and ethereal about the ambience of motels. This particular one seems to be injected with turpentine magic, moss flooding the off-white and almost lucid marble stone it's made out of bewitchingly; the beating, tangled flickers of tangerine pink-and-ruby lights makes it appear to be a mystical, hopelessly tragic place straight out of Ancient Greek mythologies, hastily patched together with all the affairs and drugs and illicit romances in the whole goddamn world. Staying here is probably a catalyst for cataclysm, Lance knows, but he assuredly checks the two of them into a room anyway, hoping they don't appear _too_ strange to the sleepy middle-aged woman at the reception counter.

As they shut the door of their motel room behind them, the first thing that hits Lance is the sweet, saccharine smell of cloying-dead roses, stuffed into a vase atop a decrepit piano ( _stolen_ , Lance thinks,  _because why the hell would a seedy old motel be able to afford such classy instruments just for decoration?_ )

The next thing he notices is the practically primeval TV that's throwing out fluorescent rays of royal blue across the entire room, coating the wooden floorboards and dusty windowsill and cracked-cobweb window in sheens of sparkly, artificial lighting. Lance follows it with his eyes and sees how it twists and turns with every angle of the room, reflecting off the dirty walls and onto the faded bedsheets, the dips and crumples on a somewhat-clean duvet that covers...  
" _One bed,_ " Lance inhales sharply as Keith yawns, "So, do we sleep now or what?"

"What?" Lance says, his head snapping towards the alien boy, who seems perfectly composed at the whole situation. "What do you mean? There's only one bed!"  
"Uh, yes, so what?" Keith says easily, making his way towards it and seating himself on the edge. "Do humans not sleep in proximity with the ones they're comfortable with?"  
_Um, yes, Keith, but comfortable means probably romantically intimate and probably people you've known longer than a day and a half. Unless it's a one-night stand.  
__"_ My bad, my bad, sorry man, of course we share," he finds himself saying emphatically instead, not quite sure what's made him take everything in his stride but not quite minding these lowered inhibitions either. He dumps his sparkly backpack onto the ground next to the bed, and then kicks his shoes off and stretches.  
"Come on then! Let's just sleep next to each other, alright, but like, no homo and all that-"  
"Do you play the piano?" Keith asks, and Lance feels his body grow rooted to the very spot in the motion blur of half a second, suspended in all of time and space.

He does, in fact, play piano, but he'd be lying if he said he knew why this strange alien doesn't understand what fashionable clothes or shopping malls or motels are, but can recognise and name musical instruments on Earth. In any case, the very mention of pianos makes his skin crawl, because he remembers the lessons he'd taken as a kid and how damn difficult they were. Making music had been one of his only escapes from the darker realities of life, one of the few things that came naturally to him; but learning musical notation had always been too hard and too rigorously controlled for his overactive brain, and he'd had his ADHD dismissed as an excuse a lot by piano teachers who'd pegged him as solely lazy and disobedient. He'd always preferred playing by ear and so had stopped taking lessons since, but nothing could ever ease the stinging burn of invalidation and mockery. He hated it then with music, hates it now with astrophysics. Sometimes it felt like the entire world's been built and moulded specifically to spite and trip up people like him.

" _Hello_ , Earth to Lance? Can you hear me? Did you fall asleep standing up or something? Do I still put you in bed?" he can hear Keith worrying in panic, distantly. He had dissociated for a minute but grounds himself again, floats back into his body and feet so he can approach the piano and reach out, stroking it.  
"I don't play," he says, and Keith sniffles, taking out Lance's bucket list from his jacket markedly.  
"Don't lie to me," he responds tartly, and opens up the piece of crumbled paper, pointing at it with purpose. " _Number twenty-one: show them my mad piano skills, and rock their world. You can get Beethoven's concerto hyping them to the max_."  
"Keith, I was thirteen and cringy,  _please_  don't read out my edgelord writing," Lance sighs, and hovers, unsure of what to do now that he's been caught in his lie. "I used to play, but not anymore. What don't you understand about that?"  
"You still have the fingers of a pianist, and I've heard that music is one of the loveliest things on Earth. It'd be super-duper helpful for my- for my  _research_ , y'know," Keith pleads, and his vespertine eyes make Lance feel like he's being defeated in a chokehold. Butterflies writhe in his stomach, and so he gives in.  
"Ugh, okay, fine, but only because you're  _begging_  me to, pretty boy," he relents, and steps closer to the piano, weighing onto one key experimentally. To his great surprise, it's tuned, and he itches to sit down and close his eyelashes and just let his fingers sing the canary melodies pumping through his heart, unravel the symphonies scrawled into his bones and between his ribs.

Maybe this isn't Keith's desire and research-aid so much as it is _his_  long-repressed desire, Lance admits to himself pathetically in his brain. And so, and so he sits down on the stool placed all rickety underneath the table, and he plays, and plays and plays and  _plays_.

The piano falls underneath his touch. His fingers melt in shades of molten calcite and nostalgia onto the charcoal-and-ivory keys beneath him, a winding melody that unties itself from the tips of his nails in fortissimo bursts of stardust. The taste of middle C is caster sugar glossing his teeth, smudging the roof of his mouth like he's drifting through outer space, TV light clinging onto his shirt in shades of cerulean and grey-gold as all his soul and secrets and thoughts come pouring out from between his rosette fingertips. He plays and plays and plays and plays, singed emotion crashing like thunderstorms against the notes as he heaves in and out with the harmony of each chord, a hybrid of  _Moonlight Sonata_  and  _Nuvole Bianche_  and  _Primavera_  if he ever knew one, fucking  _exquisite_.

That's exactly what Keith says as Lance jerks and stumbles back out of the stool on a jarring minor key, staring intently at the piano like he'd just uncovered the meaning of life.  
"Exquisite," he whispers, and his eyes are shining as brilliantly as the jewel-blazed light that encircles a solar eclipse.  
"Fucking  _exquisite."  
_ "How do you know what a piano is, and what a pianist's fingers look like?" is all Lance manages to fumblingly get out in reply, his words meshing together as though notes on the piano. His lungs feel like they're on fire, living and burning both swirling inside of them like volcanic smoke, and his throat is parched. He doesn't know why. He's yearned and yearned and yearned to feel this goddamn  _right_  for so long, for  _so fucking long_ , and now Keith has opened up that opportunity for him-  
"We had pianos where I'm from. My mother also used to play," Keith says. He looks-  _torn_.  
"You loved her," Lance surmises as it dawns on him just how similar they are, and Keith resorts to simply nod.  
"Yes, Lance. Yes, I did," he says, slowly. His voice is like syrup.  
"Do you want to sleep?" Lance asks.  
"Yes," Keith says.

And so Lance finds himself in a glowing motel room painted cadmium yellow at 3am, settling himself unsteadily next to an alien boy in a single bed, their legs knotting together in a fusion of hot and cold for lack of space. They aren't touching anything more than what's absolutely necessary, but somehow,  _somehow_  Lance feels closer to him that he's felt to anyone else before in his entire  _life_.

He feels warm. He feels a rush of something he can't quite place. He feels, for the first time, that he can drift off without wanting to die just a little inside, with this boy and his violet soul and ebony hair evanescing into him, like a saturated sunrise.

So- he does.

_(Quantum physics says that two things can never fully touch due to electron repulsion, but Lance doesn't need to touch Keith to know that he's found someone special)._

**xiv.**

The next few days deliquesce in flashes of lightning and laughter, Lance driving Keith around until the sun sinks behind heavy-lidded shadows and the world is kissed by rose-tinted warmth and cosmic opalescence. It's a week later after Lance has called in sick every day and they've gone through half the bucket list- blown iridescent soap bubbles off a roof, scaled a factory wall and run off on sight of the security guards, and freed butterflies from a conservatory just to name a few- that he decides Keith is ready to go exploring on his own. He gives him the little money he's got saved for emergencies and his spare phone, and tells him to be free for a while. After all, he's here to see Earth and not just have fun with Lance, no matter how much he seems to be enjoying it (which sends vibrant tingles all throughout Lance's body, even if he denies it to himself).

And besides, Lance has a few other responsibilities to take care of while Keith scopes around on his own. Very hefty, very weighty responsibilities. Responsibilities like-

"Lance,  _where have you been why weren't you opening your flat door when did you get ill why didn't you text me-"_  Hunk is garbling in a stream of waterfall words, and Lance sheepishly winces as his other best friend, Pidge, brings over some coffee and slams it down onto their table with a thud.

They're in the café they frequent again, but his friends look ever-so-slightly exasperated at his antics. He's disappeared off the face of Earth on more than one occasion before, sure, sometimes travelling out long distances alone to clear his mind or having weeks when he shuts himself in his apartment and overworks just to understand a certain topic. Withal, though, he's never gone AWOL for a happy or good reason before, and he's always contacted Hunk or Pidge at  _least_  once to let them know he's alive- so it's no wonder they were worried if he's been sleeping rough in motels for an entire week.

"Okay, guys, listen to me first, I've been  _totally_  fine and you're gonna realise I'm the  _best_  person in the world after I tell you what I've been up to, not that you don't already _know_   that I am, but still-"  
"Lance, you say you're fine each time you do this, yet last time we found you exhausted and asleep in a filled bathtub. You could've  _died_ ," Pidge says sternly, pushing her glasses up her nose with a sniff. She’s concerned in her own way, dark circles like smudges of graphite lining her eyelids, short hair tangled in grazes of orange and amber. Lance feels- _incredibly_ guilty.

"Stop using the past against me! I was a young, innocent,  _inexperienced_  young lad back then, and I would never do something like that  _ever_  again! It was back in the day!"  
"It was, like, two  _weeks_ ago, Lance," she groans, letting her forehead hit the table in tiredness. Lance reels.  
"I'm not dead now, though, Pidge! I'm a changed man! If I was dead, how would I call in sick the entire week?" Lance argues, sticking his tongue out. She isn’t impressed as she reaches into her bag and brings out a wad of paperwork about four inches thick, and grimaces at him pointedly. Lance gulps.  
"Well, pal, being sick everyday has led to all this catch-up work for every class you've missed.  _Sendak. Is. Not. Happy_ ," she hisses lowly, her pseudo-scary voice, and Hunk hums in agreement.  
"But, whatever, frick that, what's happened has happened. Now,  _where have you been_...?"

Lance takes one side-glance at the work on the table before pushing himself out of his chair, swiping at the pile melodramatically so that they all explode outwards in a flurry of equations and ripple to the ground. He sees the unadulterated shock- and  _confusion-_  on his friends' faces, and steels himself to explain.  
"I, the great Lance who works his ass off and swoons at the sight of mathematics, hereby quit doing schoolwork," he announces straightforwardly, and sits back down, ducking to slurp at his latté. Pidge and Hunk  _stare,_  and so does the rest of the café (but only for a second, since most of them are regulars who are accustomed to Lance's dramatics by now, and find him quite endearing).

"Um, why?" Hunk finally manages to ask awkwardly after a while, and Pidge assents. They don't seem like they're going to reprimand him but rather listen, so he continues with relief.  
"Okay, this is going to sound kind of strange and I can't really go into detail because-  _don't give me that look_ , Pidge, it's actually kind of serious as to why this time- I kind of, like, met someone who's been helping me think about what to turn in as my final research project,"  
"Okay?  _And_? Why does that mean you can't do work?" Pidge frowns, and Lance checks furiously from side-to-side in case there are any government officials or something nearby. He settles down, relieved once again when there's not, but he still leans forward and whispers inconspicuously when he next speaks.  
  
"I'm really  _onto something_ , guys and I don't think I'll have time to do literally _any_ of these irrelevant practice projects or mini essays. It's like, so big that I might have to borrow some of your stuff, Pidge, and maybe steal some stuff from the research hub too…"  
"Ooooooh!" Hunk shouts enthusiastically and supportively as a best bro should do, and Pidge shushes him with a sharp jab- " _Ooooh_ ," he corrects, in a hushed stage-whisper- before she turns back to Lance. She's smirking, evident interest suffused in her nervous fidgeting and motions.  
"I believe in you, man. But what exactly  _is_  it that you’re looking for?" she asks, and Lance briefly wonders if it'd be suitable to say. He decides that it is, because if any two people in the world will believe him wholeheartedly without mocking him, it's these two.

He takes a deep breath.

"Aliens," he blurts out, quietly. Pidge and Hunk just blink.  
"Aliens?" they say in unison, and Lance furiously backtracks.  
"Like, not in a terrible sci-fi kind of way where I shoot laser guns at moist, squid-looking, slimy creatures, but like-  _real_  extra-terrestrial life forms? I guess? I've found- signals, of a sort, with a bit of help from a person. It's just going to take a hell of a lot of time and patience to garner enough data and support my hypothesis with strong evidence, but-  _guys_. You have to believe me, okay? I'm completely and utterly serious!"  
  
Lance supposes he's never been quite so severe and earnest before, because the two engineers opposite him nod easily with glittering gazes, obviously a little scrupulous but faithful nonetheless. The tell-tale plead on his face must also be crystal-clear as heck to his friends, because they (thankfully) don't pry further, and make comments on- _other_  things, instead.

Maybe Lance would've enjoyed being interrogated about his alien research, after all.

"So, Lance," Pidge drawls, her glasses flashing as she nudges Hunk playfully, giving him a wink which he returns as though they've unravelled some sort of conspiracy.  
"Did you say you  _met someone_  who's been helping you?"  
"Oh, fling yourself into a cryovolcano please, Pidge," Lance moans and shuts his eyes. "Can we  _not_  do this right now-"  
"You haven't been this happy in ages, man, we're just glad you look like you've been getting a good night's sleep for a while! Who's the lucky person, dude?" Hunk exclaims, and Lance can't help but feel his heart swell a little at how much his friends care about him. He's so goddamn lucky to have them, he knows.

Restrainedly, he tries not to think about how he _falsely_ looks well-rested because he's been  _cuddling with a pretty alien every night_ , and simply coughs, "Fine, alright, it’s just some boy, alright? Like, it's no big deal, to be honest…"  
"It's obviously a big deal if he's special enough for you to be nonchalant about! You probs value him a bit more than the other few million girls and guys you've fancied and made a big deal out of. You only talk sparingly about precious things," Pidge declares. She knows him too well.  
He lets his head thump on the table, a mirror image of Pidge earlier.  
"Okay, you're right," he admits, huffing out the breath he'd been very aware he was holding in. "But we're not, like, an item or anything! We only met a week ago, and he's really pretty, sure-  _not like that, Pidge, stop waggling your eyebrows!-_  but, listen, he's just helping me out with my research, and that's it, okay? He's super knowledgeable about... uh... planetary science, and life forms, and stuff like that. So he's... cool, I'd say,"  
" _Cool,"_  Hunk's irises are gleaming in the way they only do after a cuddle session with Lance, or when someone compliments a meal he'd put blood, sweat, and tears into preparing (usually Lance, also).  
"Cool! So, like, have we seen him before? What does he look like? What's his name? We need to know who he is before he can fraternise with  _my bro.”_ He cracks his knuckles, jokingly.  
Lance laughs. "No, you haven't seen him, he's Korean and a little shorter than me; he's got, like, long black hair, kind of in a mullet, and pale skin and violet eyes; and his name's Keith. He isn't much for going out, so I doubt you've ever seen him."  
"Keeeeith. Nice  _grandpa name_ ," Hunk grins as no doubt a joke at the same time Pidge remarks curiously, "Violet eyes? You sure  _he's_  not the alien you've been looking for this entire time?"

Lance isn't sure why he feels his blood literally run cold or a chill run down his spine at her words, because it honestly _is_ true- Keith is, in fact,  _not of Earth._  It's kind of fucking  _terrifying_  when he  _really_  thinks about it, despite how human, and kind, and quirky and dry-humoured and sarcastic and  _warm_  he's come to find Keith in just a matter of days; the poster child for silver-lipped grace, and quicksand glances, and a smile made of chemical starshine. There's always going to be something a little  _alien_  about him, the lavender of his gaze and his faintly pointed ears and teeth and almost metallic, translucent flesh, sinewy veins latticed across his eyelids like deep currents etched beneath his skin. Yet, Keith still manages to seem so achingly familiar and his tentative touches feel so unbearably  _human_  to Lance, that he can't help but lie.

"Yes," he eventually settles on answering to Hunk and Pidge's inquisitive questions, intimating each of them in the eye.  
"Keith is very much human, unfortunately. Not an alien, although if he was, I'd love him for sure."

**xv.**

"Hey, alien boy, could you pass me the red wire over there?"

They're back on the crater, after an awkward refuelling of their stolen van at a gas station and making the trip up the dormant volcano-slash-mountain thing again. Keith has honestly been so damn  _helpful_  for real by lending Lance some of the stuff he'd collected on his explorations alone, wherein the first journey he'd made had been back to his crashed spaceship to retrieve important, irreplaceable ephemera. Lance appreciates for sure that he wouldn't be scanning the skies and actually detecting the signals had it not been for the  _incredibly advanced_ , merely foot-long radio wave receiver Keith had given him, which despite its tiny surface area and magnitude, is clearly still stronger than all the masts on Earth put together. His inner astrophysics nerd is pretty damn awed at the whole set-up that this alien boy's aided him through.  _Genius_ , his mind provides.

Keith gives him the wire, and he attaches it to a power pack and flicks a few switches on breathlessly. There's a certain kind of glamour to all this that's way different to the typical red lipstick and fashion shows and clicking heels that people  _generally_  associate the word with; Lance is pretty sure he's never seen anything as glitzy as  _this_ , all glowing telescopes and transmitters and supercomputers encased in lead, laced with cobweb wires of copper. It's ultraviolet fragility, a tangle of disintegrating but perfect technology that seems almost alive with the clicks and whirrs of gears and electrons soaring through circuits, absolutely damn  _dazzling_. Lance had never thought he'd  find electricity this gratifying and magnificent before,  but having Keith by his side and his poignant, cosmic perspective on pretty much  _everything_  is truly shining light on all the splendours of Earth's small things, and he- well, he _adores_ it.

After he's turned the receiver on and aimed everything precisely at the region of faint radio-wave diffraction he can just about make out, he leans over Keith and cracks open the apple cider they'd packed with the equipment to keep themselves awake, the only flavour of alcohol that Keith had really enjoyed over their various experiments during the week. He sips, enjoying the way the cold, bubbling drink tastes against his teeth and then ignites in his stomach, like starfalls.  
"What do we do now?" he asks.  
Sips.  
Gazes up.  
"We wait," Keith says. He contemplates upwards admiringly, too.

Lance doesn't mind, because he doesn't think he'll  _ever_  get bored of this new sky vision he has. Tonight, it's exceptionally beautiful, looking like a kaleidoscope's ruptured and spewed its phosphorescent, diamond-bright guts all across the darkness, twinkling in spills of icy crystal comets and vapour-soft limelights. As always, however, Lance prefers how the watercolour swirls of the galaxies reflect better shining onto Keith's rapt face, highlighting his slightly crooked nose and star-swept eyelashes and high, fragmented cheekbones and chapped lips.

They look so dry, in fact, that Lance doesn't think twice as he impulsively lifts a finger to caress the bottom of his mouth slowly, glacially; brings his own cold can of cider up to those pink lips, watches as Keith doesn't even  _hesitate_  to clench his eyelids tight and tilt his head back and drink, drink,  _drink_ , letting the liquid slip down his throat like blue velvet. His gulp is audible. His tongue darts out to collect the excess, presses fleetingly against Lance's fingers for a split second. Lance swallows as he watches Keith's neck stretch, honeyed-bronze, all too close to him, and suddenly all he wants to do is taste the star-pressed freckles dusting the lean line of his Adam's apple, fucking  _white-hot._  He whimpers.

Keith opens his firecracker eyes and they gaze with hooded lids heatedly at each other for a moment, for what traipses like all of eternity. Then, all of a sudden, the computer starts beeping loudly and strikes up in flashes of orange, so the spell is broken; and Lance doesn't know if he's joyful that something's been received or angry that fucking  _science_  had to ruin his... his stare-off. Of course. Just that.

( _Slices of moonlight taste like missed chances)._

"What's happened?" Keith murmurs, and there's a hitch in his words, breathless, as though he's run an entire marathon and back. Lance doesn't blame him: his heart, too, is pounding way too erratically just for sharing a fucking  _drink_  with someone, and there's a certain igneous heat curled into his groin that he'd rather  _not_  have to experience while doing physics research.  _It's all that tongue's fault_ , he supposes.  _Fucking hot. Would've happened if anyone did it, honestly.  
_ "Uh... um... hang on, let me check..." he manages to respond, raspily.  
  
Why is his voice hoarse? He’s clueless, and he feels like he's running on autopilot as he instinctually types a series of code into the computer, enters a couple of commands in binary to open up a software that Pidge may or may not have taught him to illegally download onto his personal servers from college.

Painfully, gradually, it buffers and begins to load up, both of them intent on deliberately watching the blue bar of its download progress rather than each other. Lance's mind is buzzing with static and white noise and fuzziness the whole time, fists tight by his side, and waits. It inches towards completion incrementally more. Inches. Freezes. Stops. Inches. He’s intensely aware of his pulse almost shattering when the screen displays a royal-blue sea of colour with knots of numbers scattered across it like snowflakes, and willing himself not to tear up, he picks up the print-outs of Earth's signals they'd both themselves recorded and that Keith had stored on his spaceship, holding it side-by-side with the computer monitor. His eyes flick back and forth. Looks. Checks. Looks. He takes out the pen from behind his ear. Uncaps it, shaking. He circles, in bright red, an array of letters and numbers recurring in both. He feels numb.

"Four-E-Q-U-J-four-four-zero-four," he reads out loud, his hands violently quivering. Keith reaches out and holds them steady, his touch gentle and reassuring, prompting Lance further.  
He gawks up at the beautiful alien boy, and realises that he's never felt so goddamn  _invincible_  in his entire, pathetic little life.  
  
 "Keith," he breathes, and no name has tumbled out of his mouth sounding this exalted, this fucking  _right_  before.  
"Fucking- fucking frequency received, pretty boy,  _frequency bloody received."_

He's unsure of what possesses him to do it; maybe it's how the front in Keith's eyes right now is vertigo, dizzyingly sublime, and Lance is standing tip-toe right at the edge of a volcano. Maybe it's the fact that he's  _actually_  begun fulfilling his life-long, often-mocked dream and it's finally hit him, fucking hit him like a bullet in the back; and abruptly, it's like all his memories are crumbling like star-drenched ashes all at once, paper shards of firedust floating into the universe above, something pounding in his head over and over and  _over_  again until-

All at once, all at once, he wraps his arms around Keith in an almost suffocating hug. The smaller boy stiffens for a second before relaxing into him, clinging onto Lance's side like oceans reincarnate, like he's never been touched so reverently in his life, and Lance beams. It feels like the kind of happy in children's books with hasty, colourful pictures, and it feels like the kind of happy that's only caught between dusk and dawn in stained-glass silhouettes and half-broken butterfly nets. This feeling that he's feeling is like wisps of sunlight, exhales of stardust, melancholy caught aquiver between his lungs and torn apart into a blissful peacefulness that he's never quite felt before, not ever, not  _ever_.

"I'm finally getting somewhere, Keith," he mumbles into his shoulder, and Keith doesn't need to say anything for Lance to know he's grinning wholeheartedly, too. There are slow, slow,  _slow_  fireworks painting his insides gold and warmth and all the colours of stardust, and he pulls back, newfound determination and resolve like iron lining his lungs.

They go there night after night, neck and neck while trying to complete as much of Lance's bucket list as possible to negate the tedium of continuous data collection. Lance doesn't even acknowledge how an entire month manages to pass by as they accumulate more and more evidence, Keith making spacetime almost freeze whenever they sit atop their volcano, laughing and crying and talking and suspended in their own little bubble of astral time.

"So, how many ciders can you chug in twenty seconds, Keith?"   
(He somehow gets through three entire cans, while Lance can only stomach half of just  _one_. Those damned alien genes.)

"How many spiral galaxies can you count with those lenses?"   
(Lance can count thirty-six, to which Keith responds in awe, "I could barely see two from my planet, honestly.")

"Do you know what weed is?"   
(Keith  _has_ , in fact, heard of marijuana since they had something akin to it on his planet, but since they can't find any, Lance rolls up joints of aloe vera and they attempt to smoke it instead. He's heard that apparently, you can smoke  _anything_  if you try hard enough- but it doesn't go too well, honestly, if exploding aloe vera gel slicking up Keith's mullet is anything to go by.)

"What's your favourite Earth plant?"   
("I like sunflowers," Lance says, with the biggest smile Keith has ever seen on him. He frowns back.  
"Cacti are cooler, though, and you have, like, a  _million_!"   
"Aw,  _Keith,_  sure- if you say so! They're cute and prickly, kind of like you."  
Keith turns away, then blushes.)

"Hey, Keith, you know the main reason why Earth is kind of magical, right? We have, like, a bunch of cryptids and legends that are totally real, and people still look for them to this day!"   
(Turns out Keith had already stumbled upon conspiracy theories in his Very Serious Planet Earth Research which Lance is beginning to question as the days progress- how can he know about Bigfoot, but not  _fashion_?- but anyway, he's  _extremely_  interested in them. He disputes the moon landing hoax and the Loch Ness Monster, but is very,  _very_  into Mothman apparently, as well as the Babadook.  
"He's not a conspiracy theory, Keith, he's the guy in an iconic vintage horror movie!"   
"He's an LGBT icon!" Keith proclaims, flailing his arms out in outrage. "Of course he's legendary!")

It all comes to an impasse when, after they've practically discovered everything casual there could be to discover about each other, they get a little more personal. Luckily, it's fairly comfortable for Lance when they  _do_  venture from  _"What's your favourite colour? Mine's purple"_  to _“I trust you with my life"_  territory, because he gets cosy incredibly quickly with the people he values.  
Keith, however, is a little more...  _introverted_ , to put it lightly.

"So, how long have you been around? What's your, I don't know, your...  _family_  like?" he asks, carding his fingers through Lance's cropped hair as they wait on the night's data. The sun has set, the aquamarine twilight breeze drifting in, and they're totally relaxed, Keith almost sitting on Lance's lap at this point in the night (which is  _totally_  normal).  
"I'm nineteen, nearly twenty," reveals Lance casually, to which Keith nods- "Oh, right. I'm eighteen winters of age, so I guess we're kind of similar- ish?"  
"Yep," Lance says cheerfully, popping his 'P' as he fiddles around with the computer keys and wires to print out their thirty-fourth day's worth of transmissions.   
"And as for my family- well, they're the  _best_ , better than anything else on this damned planet for sure!" he exclaims, though Keith seems a little dubious, sceptical.   
" _Anything_  else? Really?"  
"Definitely," Lance confirms, and sets down the engineering to face Keith and look him straight in the eye.   
"I know not everyone can say this, but I honestly love my family with everything I've got," he says.  
"I mean, if we're talking my actual close family, I've just got my  _Mama..._  I'm an only child, but she's enough for me. Like, her  _hugs_? There's nothing like them, dude. But, like, extended family-wise, I have about thirty relatives give or take, and a lot of them used to live with us. It was the best time of my life, being able to wake up to their loud chatter and daily plans, not gonna lie!"  
"What did you do with so many people around, though? Wasn't it... tiring?" Keith asks, but his eyes are gentle, curious- genuinely unsure of how being around a big family would work out, it seems. Lance is all too happy to help him out in learning about that.  
"It was tiring, yeah, but a  _good_  kind of tiring, if that makes sense," he says, and Keith shrugs.  
"Maybe? I don't know, could you develop that a bit more?"  
"Sure, man, uh, how can I explain this? It's... it's kind of like... like the sort of tired you get after doing a long workout, I suppose?  
Your muscles ache, and you just want to fall asleep, but you're happy and you're satisfied and you're content as hell, and you just can't wait for your next workout because it's exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. It's the  _best_ ," he reiterates, and raises his eyebrows at Keith questioningly, hoping he could understand this time around.  
"Oh, okay. That sounds nice," Keith remarks, which would sound incredibly sarcastic and bored coming from someone else's mouth, but Lance recognises now that Keith _means_ whatever he says- he's blunt and straightforward, and he doesn't bother with being overly flowery, unveiling his thoughts in very few words when he chooses to. 

With a yawn, Lance piles up the papers he's printed out and unplugs the set-up seeing as they're done for the night, but he continues talking as Keith listens attentively. He can never quite stop when someone brings up his  _family,_  and besides, how could he  _not_  indulge himself when this pretty alien boy seems so interested?

"So, like, my cousins, they're the ones who taught me how to trespass on beaches, actually... like where  _we_  first met, y'know? Funny, huh? I mean, we'd always get in trouble with  _Mama_  and their parents as well, but every summer till I was twelve, we'd haul our asses there with supplies and build campfires- God, Keith, stop looking so excited whenever I mention fire, you pyro  _freak_ \- but yeah, anyways, it was always super,  _super_  fun!  
We'd roast marshmallows, and tell stories, and play guitar, and... and kind of just forget how shitty the world was, for a while. Kind of ironic, though, since we'd be on the beaches we weren't even allowed to visit because of how much people fucked up the climate and all. But still-  _fun_."  
"That sounds so lovely," Keith smiles at the same time as Lance stops gazing wistfully into the distance and whistles, "So what about you, Keith? You haven't really told me about your family, or where you're from, and I'd love to know. Like, from what I hear of your planet, it sounds beautiful! What was it like back home?"  
  
The world seems to freeze, motionless, for a second, and the wind whistles in their ears hauntingly.  
  
"Uh- I'm sorry, pardon?" Keith coughs out, and Lance simply repeats himself without considering how uncomfortable it might be for Keith, chalking it up to his typical alien-social-awkwardness.   
"Your planet, Keith, your _family_. What was it all like?"

_Breathe. Stop. Repeat._

There's an aching silence.

Lance can only watch as Keith freezes up, then, pales to the colour of the moon, and all too fucking  _late_  Lance realises he's made a mistake by asking about the alien's forsaken family; the family he's left behind, and  _clearly_  has hinted weren't the nicest to him.  
  
_Shit! Shit shit shit, fuck, how do I fix this?  
  
_ "Um, Keith, uh... I'm really sorry, you don't need to answer that- are you  _okay_ , buddy?" he tries, softly.   
It doesn't work.  
"I don't- I don't  _want_  to talk about my family," Keith breathes out, and his voice sounds rough, helpless. His irises have turned black, the colour of burnt-out forest fires and acid, and Lance’s heart stirs in fury at whoever made him feel like he can't talk about his past.  
"Hey, that's okay, Keith, that's fine! I'm sorry, really. You don't have to-"  
" _No_ , Lance. You don't understand. I don't want to  _talk about them."  
  
_ He clearly hasn't listened to ( _or been able to hear_ ) Lance's reassurances and his breaths are coming out in short, jerky, erratic pants now, something leaking out of his eyes in molten bursts, and  _oh God he's crying what have I done why is Keith crying oh fuck what do I do?!_  is all that Lance can hear reverberating through his own mind,and he doesn't know  _what_  to do and Keith just continues not being able to breathe and suddenly, suddenly Lance's mind is filled with images, filled with snapshots that burn like a thousand fucking suns, memories that aren't his reeling in his mind like a movie of Keith's past, somehow playing up there and he wants to tear his brain away but he  _can't,_  and the visions flood through his head and-

(- _and Keith is walking through lachrymose streets, asphalt blocks, roads made of concrete and broken hearts and pennies lodged like fallen stars between the cracks on the pavement, and then he reaches a warehouse and he turns the handle and goes inside, and he flicks a lighter to life and still it doesn't restore emotion to his body or heat to his skin, stone-cold._

 _And so, he fucking_  shrieks  _and screams and yells out and hurls the lighter at a wooden crate until it's burning, burning, till everything's fucking burning burning_  burning,  _and he watches the shuddering flames erupt and gasp upwards, fucking celestial, painting all the walls of the warehouse the colour of his tears and sweltering stomach and gold, silver, violet,_  chaos;  _and he watches the fire scorch and scald and fucking_  seethe  _like the rage tearing through his innards, burning butterflies shivering downwards and setting fire to his gasoline fucking heart_ , your presence is negligible to us!  _and_  how can you be my fucking son?  _screaming and screaming and screaming till he realises it's his own voice and everything is hoarse and his arms are beginning to blister and he's crushed, he's crushed, he's crushed._

_He sinks to his knees and feels the molten heartbreak dissolving under his eyelids, white-hot tears like liquid hydrogen, and there is blood filling his lungs with every scream and every shout and every yell for help. He lies there brokenly until the fire's gone and there's nothing left but the dying glow of embers and ashes that he smears into the burns on his arm so they look more like his soul; and he lies there brokenly until the last flame has quivered out into plumes of crystalline smoke._

Destruction.)

"Keith,  _what the fuck-_ " Lance is choking out- there's a Jupiter-sized lump he can't swallow lodged in his throat, and he doesn't know why he's telepathically receiving all these re-imaginings of Keith's  _very private_  past, and it hurts and he doesn't want to see Keith in pain but apparently violence is universal across planets and bigoted  _slurs_  are universal across planets, and then the surge fucking hits him _again-_

( _"Gay, huh? How can I ever face the rest of the world again if my so-called son is a faggot?"_

 _And Keith spends nights bleeding out. He can't count how many times his father’s fists kiss his face, his ribs, his mind and body and soul in crushing eruptions of scarlet and gold and the colour of his screams for help, help,_  help,  _fucking_  agony  _and_  why can't anybody see this? Why can't anybody just help me? What did I do to fucking deserve this? Why?  _and he kicks and yells and yells and_  yells, you fucking useless piece of shit, you deserve nothing!,  _and the blood dries in sugar-spun swirls along Keith’s forehead, his arms, his legs, cobalt bruises weeping beneath his skin like fragments of long-gone galaxies, chaos and cataclysm because_  that's all you're fucking made for, Keith, all you ever think about is yourself, you piece of fucking shit,  _and he cries and cries and_  cries  _until his eyelashes are stitched half-shut like wounds and there are tear-stains like dried moondust slashed across his cheeks, destruction. Destruction._  Destruction.)

"Keith. _Keith_. Stop," Lance cries out, tremulous. He reaches out, engulfs the alien boy in his arms, unsteady but unyielding. Keith's body is shaking, wracked with sobs.  _I'm sorry, I didn't want you to see that, I don't know how I put it into your brain, I'm sorry...  
_ Lance massages slow circles into Keith's glass-ridged spine.  
It's a long time until he opens his eyes again.  
But he does.

**xvi.**

"Why did you come to Earth?"  
_(Because I wanted to escape cut-glass words, and mechanical hearts, and silver bullets for tongues, Lance. Because I wanted to be happy.)  
_ "To research its beauty."  
_Breathe. Stop. Repeat.  
_ "Why did you come to Earth?" Lance repeats, voice void.  
_(Because I wanted to escape pain. Because I wanted to escape being an alien on my own. Fucking. Planet.)_ _  
_ "I told you, Lance," Keith says. He grits his teeth, steels himself against the sting that's threatening to spill again from behind his lashes.  
"To research its beauty."  
"You don't have to lie to me, Keith," Lance hisses. " _Please_. Don't. I just want the  _truth_."  
_(Because all I've ever known is ugliness, Lance! Because I wanted to see if other planets would feel more like home than my own fucking father did to me. Because I wanted to find something fucking beautiful. I'm not goddamn lying.)  
_ "To find something beautiful!" Keith finally yells, breaking; splintering;  _shattered_.  
"To find something beautiful, to be able to find things beautiful without being half-beaten to death for it, and abandoned by the people who were supposed to love me! Is  _that what you want to hear_?! Well, now you know! Go ahead, leave me too!" he spits.  
"Keith," Lance whispers.   
His voice cracks.  
"Lance."

_Breathe. Stop. Repeat._

"Are you... are you going to stay here?" Lance questions, and his voice is small. Electron-bright. Keith's mind feels like a patchwork remix of noise, of static, of every atom in the universe colliding and blinding, colliding and  _destroying_ , catalysing cataclysm, all at fucking once.   
"I don't know," he says, truthfully; scaldingly.   
"My mom died. My dad stopped paying attention. I got in the damned spaceship I've been planning to fly since I was  _nine winters old_ , and got here on a whim! I have no clue what the hell I'm doing! All I know is that I came here to find some beauty, and obviously I found  _someone like you,_ and of course I want to stay, but I don't know how. I don't belong here. I don't belong _anywhere_ -"  
"Hey, hey, pretty boy. Stop that. Stop  _this_ \- stop all the putting yourself down business." Lance shakes his head, and grabs Keith's hands, intertwining their fingers like lock-and-key. He glances up.

Keith's eyes are rimmed with scarlet, with rose-red sangrias. He gently lifts the sleeves of his borrowed jacket, and shudders, because there are still old bruises wrapped around those paper-white arms. It's all violet  _violence_ , purple stains and yellow blooms smudged across starlight skin; it's like a wild interstellar storm has bled into his veins, amethyst explosions close to the surface and threatening to break in starbursts of blue and rage. Lance can practically feel how Keith is struggling to breathe again, numb,  _numb,_ cracking down the middle, but he tries to be as comforting and as honest as he can be, easing him back into the unspoken trust they'd developed before.

Lance recognises that he isn't a master with words, not like Hunk and Pidge are. He can't get fragments of sentences to line up, to dance, to pat others on the back when they're sad or pull their cheeks up when they're happy.   
But if there's one thing that he prides himself on, it's his persistence, his perseverance. He will  _never_  give up. And so, he pulls himself together and makes direct eye contact with Keith as he lifts the other boy's arm carefully, tenderly; peppers soft, barely-there kisses along each of the bruises littering his skin, distilled darkness like rips in the fabric of spacetime.  
"You do belong here, Keith," he finally says. Keith stares at him, shaken.  
"I don't care if you're from another planet, or whatever. You still have blood running through your veins, even if it's of a different colour-" he presses his fingers on Keith's wrists, delicately, watching it pool in metallic shimmers beneath his flesh- "You have brittle bones, you have a brain, you have a heart. You're more human than a lot of the people who live on Earth, by far.  
Honestly, dude- it doesn't even matter  _why_  you came here anymore, whether it was to stop being like- like a  _prisoner_  on your planet, or whether it was just because you're an intergalactic space traveller. You're here now, is what matters- here with  _me._  And no offence, buddy, but if I let you go at  _this_  point, that'd probably be the biggest mistake of my entire life. Even more so than buying those clothes you wore the first time I got you dressed."

Keith's eyebrows are furrowed. He looks like he's about to cry again.

"Thank you, Lance," he says, hoarse. Lance just smiles, faintly.  
"I just- I know it's so important to detect extra-terrestrial life as an astrophysics student, but it's just- my planet is so cruel, and it's the worst place to look for it. What if you submit your findings and Earth tries to make contact, and my father comes here and find me instead? What if he  _takes me back_? What if-"  
"Hey, man," Lance soothes, his face a perfect mask of calm and compassion. He smooths his forehead against Keith's, places a hand on his heart to feel it slow down as they melt into each other.  
  
"There's more than enough data now, and I could probably sort through it all and submit it in a couple of days, okay? Truth be told, I realised a while ago I wasn't just picking up transmissions from  _your_  planet. There's other signals edging into the data too, maybe from other life forms, and if I focus on those and take out the bits specific to where you're from, they won't be  _able_  to come and take you. You're safe with me. And even if I'm not turning in your planet's data in the end,  _you're_  the one who's helped me do this.  _You_  set me on my path, found me something I can actually concentrate on and not fail at. So thank  _you._ "  
"What,  _no,_  Lance, I'm not-"  
"No, nonononono _no,_  shut your quiznak, pal," Lance shushes. His expression has never looked as fond, as enamoured. He drags his splayed fingertips to entwine cautiously with the silver-lipped boy's, touches the chimerical pulse and blinking heartbeat as though it's his own; and then, he reaches out to tuck a stray strand of Keith's curls behind his ear, buries his face in the crook of his neck, places another cinnamon kiss there like soft candlelight and crushed velvet.  
"That's a tradition, where I'm from," he echoes from the flower shop, and Keith doesn't need to see him to feel the neon-blue grin arching over his collarbone.   
"Listen. You're not the only one hurting- here, on Earth, we're all right there with you. But it's time to forget all those old things and old traditions, because it's all in the past, now, and anyone who loves you would want you to move on. I _-_   _I_ want you to move on. So now's the time to make new traditions, alright? New ones with me. Well, I hope so, anyway."

Keith's florid, flushed cheeks glitter in the moonlight. Lance feels like he's swallowed whole universes, balls of fire and smoke and starswept nebulae drifting inside of his chest, like clouds.  
_  
(There is dark matter fluorescing beneath my skin now, Keith,  
and there's a cluster of galaxies blooming in my chest  
that I want to call by your name.)_

**xvii.**

Honestly- a fortnight later, Lance isn't quite sure what  _exactly_  he'd expected of Sendak when he presents all of his findings to him, neatly organised and filed into separate binders with a report to match. But what he sure  _didn't_  anticipate was a complete replica of how his alien ideas had been shot down as a thirteen year old, ripped up and blown to smithereens like his aspirations. 

_Life, eh?_

_("Hey, Keith! Come see this, I'm nearly finished!"_

_It's been a week and a half since their whole bonding-moment-thing on the volcano, and Lance has been working non-stop ever since to try and give his project a solid structure and basis. Hunk and Pidge had finally dropped by and met Keith, which was kind of awkward at first but also hilariously heart-warming for Lance at the same time- "So you're Lance's boyfriend, huh?" Hunk had teased, much to his best bro's chagrin and pseudo-irritation.  
__"What's a boyfriend?" Keith had quipped back with a carefully-crafted, completely blank expression on his face, Lance later coming to the realisation that he had probably played up his obliviousness for humorous purposes- but anyway, they had all dissolved into fits of giggles, Pidge actually needing to remove her glasses from crying with laughter.  
__"Oh, Lance," she'd chuckled, wiping them on her shirt bemusedly.  
__"Keith here, he hasn't just got them dazzling purple orbs- he also doesn't understand basic terms of affection. Definitely an alien!"  
__"Heh, well... you've got_  that  _right." Keith's eyes had twinkled, and he had exchanged a small little smirk with Lance then, their own little joke. After that, though, he'd taken to bonding with Pidge over conspiracy theories and with Hunk over Fraunhofer lines and radial-velocity-wotsits, leaving Lance to work tirelessly_   _(and struggle) through data organisation alone._

 _No, really, it_  had  _been a huge struggle. Sure, Lance isn't the pitifully insecure, melodramatically tragic person that others seem to paint him as when they hear he has panic attacks, or that he's suffered mentally in the past, or that he maintains a diagnosis of ADHD. He's all for eradicating mental health stigma, but he truthfully does find it awkward when others persistently_ _view him as constantly self-loathing and needing to depend on others for validation; it's kind of degrading, since he isn't that two-dimensional at all. Still, though: for all his bouts of self-confidence and "fake it till you make it" arrogance, he_ does _in fact have difficulties focussing on one thing at a time and paying attention to the details, so much so that he has to go back and check over his work ten times after he's done (which in itself requires_  more  _concentration). He continues to use the same microphone he bought as a thirteen year old to typify his thoughts. He also has Keith living with him, and he'd definitely helped a lot in keeping Lance away from the verge of mental breakdowns by colour-coding his labels, cleaning his desk, and even learning how to make tea just to brew some (surprisingly good) chamomile for Lance's nerves._

 _Struggle has always been a massive part of his life, but that's just part of what makes actually finishing a task (however irrelevant it seems) so valuable and rewarding to him. It's why_  now  _that he can finally see all his work coming to life and slotting together like a jigsaw puzzle, he feels more excited than he's ever done before.  
__"Nearly finished?" pipes up Keith, equally as invigorated, whisking into the room with two steaming-hot mugs of earl grey. Lance nods and beams and beckons him over, preening instantly at the gasp of awe and wonderment that Keith lets out at the sight._

_He's spread everything out on his desk and corkboard so that it's all ordered in a chronological sequence, a fairytale concoction of his sparkly physics-based dreams. Pinned up on the corkboard are the high-resolution photographs that Keith had helped him take with some of his spaceship's stronger, more advanced alien cameras; and beneath each of the photos are rows and rows of tiny, scrawled numbers detailing their contents, each and every one of them meticulously handwritten by Lance's very own shaking brown hands. They all connect to folders of more numbers, faultlessly corresponding to each other and matching up in trends and patterns that indicate potential life; and although to others it would look like a massive tangle of complex graphs and equations that make little sense, to Lance it adds up perfectly._

_"Beautiful," Keith says, and Lance laughs, the sound ringing out across the living room like birdsong.  
_ _"You're the first person who's ever called my flavour of Physics beautiful, you know," he chortles, and Keith pinches him.  
_ _"Not sure why humans aren't that fond of numbers and math, though. If it can lead to things like this, then it's the best thing in the world.")_

**xviii.**

And so he shows Sendak, who barely flicks through it all before bringing his fingers to his temples, massaging them roughly. Squints at Lance with those dead, festering eyes.

_(He is not rewarded.)_

**xix.**

"In all my _years_ of teaching, McClain, this is the worst thing I've seen by far."

**xx.**

_("McClain, what is the meaning of this?" his teacher demands with a part-angered, part-mocking sardonic lilt in his voice, and Lance feels his heart sink all the way to the ground, heavy as though there's a brick tangled around every organ within him.)_

"Professor, if I may-" Lance starts, trying not to let his knees buckle or the scorching behind his eyeballs turn into shivering tears- "If I may, you haven't even tried going  _through_  it, sir. I- I've been working on it day and night through my absences, sir, and I used state-of-the-art technology to retrieve all the data. You won't be disappointed, I swear-"  
"Did you _steal_ from our research department, McClain?" Sendak counters, completely ignoring what Lance had said about the quality of his work. He clenches his jaw as the first dizzying rushes of self-doubt begin to leak into his mind like battery acid, begs himself not to think of the past,  _don't think of the past, Lance, don't think of the past..._

_(His teacher rips the pages in one brief, fleeting half-second, Lance's carefully hole-punched and taped-together sheets swirling to the floor like snowflakes. Dead bodies. Decay.)_

Sendak doesn't tear Lance's work into a million pieces, however. He just leaves the binders strewn half-open on the desk with sheets of paper trampled on the ground instead, Lance's week-long organisation dismantled in mere seconds; and he doesn't even bother to read past the title of his report, a fucking  _twenty-thousand_ word effort written by Lance in a caffeine-fuelled two days. 

_On Extra-Terrestrial Life: When Is Good Art Ever Conventional?_

"I'm awfully sorry to disappoint  _you_ , McClain, but I want you to take your  _unconventional_  ideas and lock them away in that head of yours, because we don't have time for your implausible theories. You're doing astrophysics, McClain, not  _theoretical astrobiology pseudo-science_ -" Sendak sneers, "- And I'd be lying if I said I didn't think that all this behaviour makes you a massive waste of potential. Aliens don't exist- grow up, you're nineteen. Stop acting like a child."

_(Lance stares._

_"Aliens don't exist," Mr Ealing says shortly, and coughs to hide a condescending laugh, eyes filled with mirth and bemusement at Lance's apparently infantile antics.  
_ _"You know as well as I do that only children believe in aliens, and you're not a toddler anymore! Come on!" he chides patronisingly, and shakes his greasy, matted head as Lance simply continues to glower down, down, down- down at the hours and hours and days and months it had taken to solve through everything in his messy head, attention span too short to write, having to speak into the expensive microphone he bought with his own measly allowance to record and typify his thoughts, obsessing and fixating over fixing his grammatical errors even though grammar doesn't really matter in making scientific breakthroughs but it does matter when everyone insults him for having ADHD and now he'll never get anywhere and he's a failure and all his efforts were for nothing and-)_

"Professor, it's not the way you're making it out to be. This is all hard science, believe me, I've made a  _breakthrough-"  
__"Lance. McClain_. Don't talk back to your seniors," Sendak jeers, and he clamps his mouth shut, ears beginning to roar with the infallible buzz of  _failure, failure, failure_.  
"I'm not sure you understand the severity of what you've done. You've skipped college and faked illness just to put together some sort of elementary school-style science fair project! I mean, for God's sake, is this what you want to  _graduate_  with- is education some sort of joke to you? I certainly hope I'm not working here anymore when you can't get into college again for a Master's-" he rolls his eyes, "-so please, just- get a grip. You've missed out some really essential worktime towards your finals, and even then, you're always in need of  _extra time_. I can't give you that special treatment anymore for some made-up inability to  _follow goddamn rules_  you claim to have, McClain..."  
"It's not made-up," Lance whispers.   
He can't breathe.  
" _Stop talking back to me!_ ” Sendak yells, irate.  
“McClain, the students taking  _my_  courses are here to complete their studies and then work to help the government regain respect,  _not_  to pretend they've discovered something revolutionary! I did have a _small_ bit of hope for you and tried to chalk up your issues to your single-parent background and being _coloured_ , but really, none of those unfortunate things are suitable excuses. Don't justify your inattentiveness with a pseudo-disorder, McClain, and  _don't_  come to me expecting  _nonsense_  to negate how much you've made my reputation decline. Take your work, and leave. I'm seriously considering kicking you out of this course unless you apologise."   
  
He gathers up the folders and carelessly piles them up so that they're crumpled against each other, thrusting them into Lance's arms.

 _(Lance flushes a deep, deep red, stands brokenly and lets the heat submerge his cheeks like they're sinks of embarrassment, of degradation. He bends down and picks up the one scrap of paper left intact, with his judiciously crafted bucket list- peeps up, sees Mr Ealing rolling his eyes- thrusts the paper in his blazer pocket and bows his head, blistering tears pricking behind his eyelids as he apologises.  
_ _"I'm sorry, Sir, I won't do it again," he spits reluctantly, untruthfully.  
_ _"Of course aliens don't exist. I was just being dumb and stupid. Forgive me.")_

And oh, God, he can't breathe,  _can't breathe,_  feels the kind of black he can only see when he digs the palms of his hands into his eye sockets; and there are electric currents pulsing into his fingertips and searing through his veins and screaming into his consciousness, all bittersweet agony and acrid sadness and the distinct taste of  _failure_. But also, also he's fucking  _angry_ , fury raging in his chest like there's an inferno between his ribs, trying its hardest to jump out. He  _burns_.   
_I am not a single-parented, ruefully coloured, pseudo-mentally ill charity case! I'm more than_  all  _of those things! My ideas are not shit, and hard work trumps genius. This guy needs to fucking learn, and then kindly fuck off._

"Did you hear me, McClain? Unless you apologise and manage all the catch-up work without whining about ADHD, I'll disqualify you from the course. So apologise. And then return all of that stolen equipment, and make a list of everything you have to pay back.  _Now_."

( _"Of course aliens don't exist. I was just being dumb and stupid. Forgive me.")_

_(Forgive me. Forgive me. I'm sorry. Forgive me.)_

" _Fuck you_ ," Lance says instead, straight to Sendak's face. 

He stiffens.

 _"Excuse me?"  
_  
"Fuck you," Lance sneers again, and goes over to a table to collect the last of his work before kicking at a chair destructively, making sure it collapses at Sendak's feet. The legs splinter and crease and break, and Sendak just, he just...  _stares_.  
" _What_ -"  
" _Do you not get it? Fuck you!_  I'm over this fucking shit!" Lance yells, throwing his arms up in surrender, stepping right up to the burly teacher so he can spit every last fucking  _syllable_  into his smug, hardened face.  
"God,  _please_  bloody kick me out, I'll be happy to go! Fuck you, and your racism and ableism, and also for making me cry at least three times a day for the past two years! You don't want to acknowledge my hard work? That's  _fine_. I was never gonna be an astrophysicist anyway since it doesn't mean  _shit all_ anymore, it used to be about  _discovering_  but now it's all about serving the shitty ass  _government_ , goddamn it," he growls, "And yeah, sorry, but my  _'made-up inability to follow rules'_  means I can't do that!  _Fuck_  you, man, fuck you, and don't ever call me a waste of potential again, because I'm  _not."_

Lance ignores the roar of the thundering, cacophonous ocean in his ears, all saltwater turbulence and liquid wrath. He trips on his way out, twisting his ankle and crinkling his papers even more; but he leaves nonetheless, head held high and tears visceral against his skin, because he  _owns_  his goddamn feelings.

_Fuck this shit._

**xxi.**

"Guys, I need you to come over and help, right  _now_ ," Keith whispers into the telephone, staring hopelessly at Lance's locked door. He'd come home from a day of exploring by himself expecting to celebrate with Lance over his success, perhaps by eating some ramen noodles or even going out for a drive; but instead, he'd been greeted with barely-there sobbing and muffled " _Go away, Keith"'_ s and Lance, the brightest boy in the whole wide world, isolating himself and not coming out of his room. 

He's concerned since it's been hours, now, and it's almost nearing midnight, which is usually the time Lance enthusiastically brings out some old films and teaches him about vintage pop culture. It was about time he called Hunk and Pidge, honestly, given that he knows Lance trusts them more than anyone else in existence; and thankfully, they don't need any further explanation when they rush into the apartment approximately ten minutes later and see Keith feeling conflicted, drained, and utterly exhausted on the couch, rocking back and forth. They don't question why he's here so late or why he's seemingly moved in, and they don't make any comments about his exposed, bruised arms and oily, knotted hair and under-eye bags like thunderstorms. 

They simply ask where Lance is.

"He's in his room, I think," Keith says, and Hunk looks troubled, his knitted scarf half-open and hair bandanna crudely untied.  
"Do you know what happened before all this, Keith?"  
"Yes," he responds shortly, and summons a deep breath, unsure whether Lance had previously revealed the exact contents of his work to his friends; but he fathoms that it's important to tell them everything anyway in case it's of any relevance, so he does.  
"He went to submit all his work and experiments and data- the stuff he's been working on for ages that proves extra-terrestrial life exists, y'know? And, I mean, I forgot the teacher's name he mentioned he was going to, but he did seem pretty anxious about it. Like, theoretically it should've gone  _well_ , because all of his work was cool and new and  _right,_ and he absolutely poured his heart and soul into it all, I  _watched_  him-" Keith gulps, "-but now he's so torn up, and he won't let me in, and I feel _so_... um, yeah.  _Bad_. I feel bad. So can y'all help him, please?  _Please_. Thank you."  
" _Sendak_ ," Pidge hisses viciously as she bolts to Lance's bedroom without any other words of elucidation, and Hunk simply pats Keith (who's aware that he'd just sounded  _very_  awkward) on the back with a large, comforting hand, smiling at him gently.   
"Of course we can help him, man, don't fret your little head or feel so terrible, okay!" he lulls.  
"We'll have him out in no time, and you can talk to him afterwards- I'm sure he'll want your comfort too. Why don't you go and eat something in the meantime?"  
" _O_ -okay," Keith exhales, and tries not to mention the fact that he's still learning how to combine and eat human foods properly with Lance ( _"Keith, butter goes on toast, not on bananas..." "But they're both yellow!")._  The only thing he truthfully  _can_  safely consume when he's alone is tea, and so he sets himself up with the kettle and tea pouches, trying to focus on the boiling water rather than the distant sound of Lance talking and crying in his bedroom.

He's gotten through four whole cups of tea in all his favourite flavours- China rose, lemon drizzle, chocolate coconut, Turkish apple- when Hunk and Pidge come out of Lance’s room again a while later, looking tired and sad but definitely a lot more contented than they'd been before.  
"He's feeling a bit better now," Hunk reassures him as he laces up his shoes, getting ready to leave, bags dark under his eyelashes from sleep deprivation and the comforting of a lost friend. Pidge hums in agreement.  
"Yeah, he just needed to vent a little, and he probably thought it'd be easier to do that with us since we go to the same college as him and can talk him through the logical options and stuff," she says, easily. Then she swallows.  
"It's a bit of a shitstorm in there, though, so be careful when you go in. He wouldn't mind seeing you now, I think."  
"Oh," Keith gapes as they open the door and leave him there with his mouth hanging open, Hunk calling out merrily, "Use a condom if anything happens, please!"

He bristles, and takes another two minutes to infuse some chamomile tea with honey for Lance, pouring it into his favourite star-printed mug. Gingerly, he blows on it after it's done and watches the steam spiral upwards like snowy mist, knocking on Lance's door and waiting for him to answer.  
"Just come in," he hears him say scratchily in agitation, and nimbly pushes the door open with his hip, hoping it isn’t as bad in there as Pidge had suggested.

Unfortunately, it does. 

Lance's room is mostly as it is always, walls painted with the deepest shade of oceandust blue and smoothed over with vintage posters, all  _Star Wars_  and  _Interstellar_  and other movies from times long past. His floor is still a sea of messy clothes and dirty laundry, t-shirts and jeans and jackets and even  _blazers_  lying in wrinkled heaps, mini mountains of lazy memories. There are still glow-in-the-dark-stars and marine life stickers plastered to his ceiling, still old piles of polaroids and a rustic, mermaid-tail lamp resting on his desk,still ragged old lace curtains and fairy lights lining his window with a view of the monochrome city sidewalk underneath.

And yet, yet there's one thing different. Lance is lying in the middle of his bed with his hair sprawled out around him like a halo of caramel-bright supernovae, the whites of his sclera bloodshot and his top stained with tears; and surrounding him are thousands and thousands of tiny shreds of paper, fragments of dreamdust glowing in the darkened room, lost stars.

 _His work,_  Keith realises.  _That's all his work._

"Hey," Lance calls out hoarsely, and Keith simply makes his way over to the bed and clears a place to sit down next to him, sweeping at some of the paper so that they flutter to the ground like raindrops.   
"Hey," Keith says.  
"Okay, so, like- whatever you want to ask now, just ask it, okay? You know I like how straightforward you are," Lance groans.  
"I don't have anything to ask you. I brought you tea, that's all," Keith says, and hands him the tea. Lance's face relaxes a little, a small smile playing at his lips, and just that tiny movement sends little waves of heat echoing down the rungs of Keith's spine.  
"I love you, buddy, I hope you know that..."  
"The feeling's mutual, I'd make a thousand shitty chamomile teas for you if it'd make you show your face to me when you're sad. Uh-  _not_  to make you feel guilty or anything. But, like, yeah, I lied just now- obviously- I  _do_  actually have a question, if that's alright?"  
"Ohoho, let me guess- why am I so incredibly handsome even after a mental breakdown, and what kind of skincare routine do I have? I call my routine the  _sweet scent of success_ ," Lance grins and finger-guns over-extravagantly, "Okay, okay. I'm lying too. I'm leaning more towards failure than success, but that's okay, okay? I've  _accepted_  it, now-"  
"Why did you rip up all your work?" Keith asks, simply, and Lance allays mid-word, mouth frozen in an empty echo. He winces, then sighs, then sits up next to Keith, laying his head on his shoulder softly. It's all very slow, as if they're trapped in their own little glass dome where time ceases to exist.

"I was angry, that's all," he admits, and turns his face into Keith's long curls, pressing them into his shoulders.   
"I'm kinda impulsive when I feel strongly about something, y'know, and like, I wanted to do something symbolic, man. My teacher called me a fucking  _waste of potential_  and totally humiliated me- I mean he didn't even bother to read past the  _title_  of my report- so, like, I kinda just thought  _fuck the system_  an _d fuck having to do work,_ if that makes any sense _?_ It's like anarchy, y'know. Rebel against the authority, and rebel against the rules he thinks I can't follow, and all that..."  
" _He didn't even read your work_ ," Keith fumes with narrowed eyes, and pushes Lance off of his shoulder to showcase his total fury. His gaze is a  _hurricane.  
_ "We went to our volcano night after night, taking two hours to do that complicated set-up and another three to collect data, and you lost sleep and worked for weeks on purely  _caffeine_  and wrote a twenty-thousand word report, just for him to  _dismiss it_?" he hisses, and Lance ducks his head, just as infuriated.  
"That  _fucker_ ," Keith almost shouts and clenches his fists in rage, livid; and it's the first time Lance has heard him swear, which he finds kind of hot, if he has to be  _totally_  honest.  
"You know I'd love to pull a knife on him, Lance, I hate the authority here as much as I did on  _my_  planet..." he's seething, and Lance just chuckles, leans against him again and senses him breathing in, out, in, out, as human as can be.  
  
"Alright pretty boy, we get it, you're cool and emo and anti-establishment and all that. Poet in the making," he laughs.  
"But really, I'd love to get some sort of revenge on him, because it has kind of made me feel the sort of insecure that'll probably last for months on end. You know me- I wanted to, I don't know,  _revolutionize_  the world of Physics and show that my dreams aren't stupid and prove the point that I can overcome any difficulties- because, like, I can! Everyone's always told me that aliens don't exist, and made me feel bad for it, but here you are," he says, placing a hand over Keith's heart tenderly, "And it's made me feel like the furthest from bad I've ever felt. Like,  _ever_. So, I don't know, thanks for that, man. You've helped me- a  _lot_ ,"  
"Why is this beginning to sound like a love confession from one of your vintage space operas," Keith jokes, and prods at Lance's side, affectionately.  
"Because it is. I love you, samurai," Lance laughs, and Keith grins back at him, his heart feeling full like he's just drunk a hundred cans of alcohol or something.  
"I know," he responds tartly.  
"Did you- did you just  _Han Solo me?"_ Lance gasps, and claps him on the back with a gleefully proud expression on his face.   
"So my lessons in pop culture are paying off, after all! You're now a Star Wars master!"  
"Okay, stop missing the point though, Lance. I don't want you to feel bad about yourself anymore," he deviates, carefully.  
  
"Like, if there's one thing I've learned about Earthling education systems, it's that they're unfair as can be. And Lance- you don't need to change the world and make  _ground-breaking_  discoveries while in college, only to get a degree," he says.   
"You can just make a star catalogue or something- it's the simplest math ever, all parallax and radial velocities that Hunk was teaching me, but you can still graduate with that kind of stuff. Your schoolwork can be the most mediocre thing in the world, and that's alright, right? There's... there'll be time,  _so_  much time for revolution later. For now, just focus on getting out of there, and  _then_  you can work on bigger and better ideas. And, besides-" he gulps.  
"You've already revolutionized  _my_  life, y’know. I'm… I’m not sure how much more I can take."  
After that, he proceeds to cough awkwardly, hopes that Lance doesn’t see the heat that floods his cheeks in stains of cherry-red.  
  
"That's, like, the most simultaneously awkward and romantic and inspiring speech  _anyone's_  ever given me, Keith," Lance chuckles, but his eyes are gleaming brightly like they would before Sendak’s reproaching.  
"But, I hear you. I just- I don't know what I'm supposed to do, now; I feel kind of stuck. What can I do but study and work my ass off, all for nothing? What can I do but  _dream_?"  
"Stop dreaming, start doing," Keith says, seriously, and although it sounds like a cheesy quote that soccer moms would hang on their walls, it's true.  
"Honestly, just stop thinking about particles and planets and potential differences for once. Let's go  _adventure_ ," he continues, "You told me once you'd show me all the beauties on Earth, and I don't think we finished. Why don't we go do that?"

"Hey- do you remember where that mangled old bucket list is?!" Lance lights up, looking like he's just had the best idea. Keith doesn't even reply instantly, just smirks and grabs him by the hand so they can leave the room and all of Lance's forsaken work and burdens behind.  
"Yes," he grins as they walk down the passage for the hundredth instance since they first met, a mischievous glint shimmering in his irises.   
"Let's go finish what we started."

The chamomile tea lays untouched on Lance's bedside drawer, still hot and saccharine and brewed with Keith's love- wholly forgotten, but  _who fucking cares,_ because Lance has the real person anyway.

**xxii.**

It's 1:45am and they're blazing down the highway, every van window rolled down as Keith accelerates to the speed of light. Lance's bucket list is pinned to the rear-view mirror, trembling in the gusts of wind and winterlight and five thousand pounds of hot steel roaring beneath it, and all of his entries are scribbled out in hasty black sharpie but one.

Their  _very last_  adventure. They're the kings of the cobweb hours, leaving sparks in their wake as the lucid headlights flash in pulses and flickers of tangled luminescence, glowing opalescent like ruby-torn fireflies. The cities that flash past are alive, breathing, moondust-blue heartbeats; the trees sigh out in puffs of jade and jasmine; the road stretches out like the afterlife in front of them, jewel-bright yellow lines reaching and reaching and  _reaching_  into the distance where the moon hangs heavy, and the sky whispers pink. The stars aren't out. That's okay. They're the stars, just for tonight. That's okay, too.

"How did the last thing on your bucket list align  _perfectly_  with getting revenge on your teacher?" Keith yells, and his voice is carried by the zephyr and rings out, out,  _out;_ out into the soft landscape of sweeping branchlets and radioactive small towns that encompass them, loud and saturnine, quiet and enigmatic. They both shriek and laugh, and nothing's ever sounded as symphonious and sweet to Lance as their harmony of happiness in that very moment, entangled between celluloid scenes and midnight sun dreams.  
"I don't know, Keith, how  _did_  we manage to find graffiti cans in the trunk of this shitty ass van when that's  _exactly_  what we intend to do?!"

They're blazing down the highway, and they're sinking into the other side of paradise.  _Get graffiti cans, wreck a place, and goddamn break the Earthly laws!_  sparkles Lance's thirteen-year-old writing emblazoned on the frayed, threadbare bucket list, and he doesn't essentially believe in fate, but it's no coincidence that their stolen van  _just so happened_  to have spray paint stashed in the back. It's spontaneous and dangerous and probably stupid as  _fuck_ , but they're speeding down the motorway to Lance's crappy college campus now, ready to vandalise the wall of Sendak's stinky old Physics building- or, more specifically, get a little artistic beneath the window of his office.   
It's going to be a fucking  _masterpiece_. They both know it.

There's something else much more profound happening in the van between them, though, something that's making the breath catch in Lance's throat and his mouth drier than the sun. Keith is fiddling with Lance's knees as he drives on and the world is halcyon, content, filled with swimming pools and rose gardens set on fire as they ride, travelling blindfolded into a kingdom of  _something_  and  _maybe_  and  _we could be soulmates_ from the centre of a black hole. Keith's a young god, his eyes wide shut, lashes flickering like lanterns on his delicate, deep-freckled skin while he steers; and Lance reaches out to coil his fingers into his, ties them together like atoms at the beginning of all time.

His thumb traces patterns of satellites and spaceships and star fields into Keith's cherry-glass, scarlet syrup knuckles, and there's a daisy pressed into the AC between them, the same one Keith had threaded behind Lance's ear all those weeks ago. Everything is electric, and the very  _air_  is fucking buzzing.   
  
_Oh, my God, I feel so fucking alive._

_Oh, my God, I think I'm in love with him._

When they pull up and get out, Lance doesn't dare let go of Keith's velveteen hand, the sunrises webbed in between his fingertips white-hot and addictive. They grab the box of aerosol cans and in the silent nightfall, save for their crunching footfall and slight panting, it's just the two of them in the world; the ground shifting beneath their feet like they're tilting the earth on its very axis as they stride on, kings and emperors and defenders of the whole entire fucking  _universe_. 

 _Trekking on_. It's slow, and gradual, but they eventually reach the wall separating them from the inside of the campus at almost 2am, Keith looking forward feverishly in intoxication, not noticing how the boy by his side has eyes for him and  _only_  him. To Lance, the smouldering bruises on Keith's translucent skin are bursts of rainbow-drenched kerosene, cosmic ultraviolence in the deep of the night; and he wonders how many infinities there are in the orchids of his eyes and if they can be counted, if there's some way to  _categorise_  the way he feels about him rather than just opaline skylights swirling in his stomach.  
  
"Keith," he says, so that the alien boy whirls on his toes to face him and he can almost taste the soft puffs of air on his face, crimson candlelight, red-hot exhalations that feel like royal silk on his cheeks.  
"Yes, Lance?" Keith breathes, but he seems to be feeling the tension between them as much as Lance is, rigid and crystalline, all too easy to shatter. He seems to be feeling the tension as much as Lance is and he seems to want the same things Lance does and he seems to get the hint, because one second they're apart and the next they're as close as can be, Keith tentatively tracing circles on Lance's hips over the thick fabric of his sweater.  
"Do you think this is a bad idea," whispers Lance, and Keith chuckles with all his heart, lowering his head shyly so that his fond expression is obscured by his black locks.  
"Of course it's a bad idea, Lance. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it," he whispers back.

And the next moment Lance is tilting Keith's chin up so that their eyes are meeting, his touch lingering on Keith's skin like rosemary and thyme, and he swallows and wills himself not to think but he just can't fucking  _do_  it anymore, can't  _not_ think when the boy in front of him is a such a mismatched canvas of stardust and awkward, undulated eloquence; and he's just so breathtaking, so goddamn enthralling and  _unusual_  and Lance doesn't even know what to do because they're both inching closer and closer, and he can't stop wondering what Keith tastes like and if he knows what the fuck he's doing right now because  _Lance_  sure as heck doesn't know, and-

And then they're together, they're  _together_ , their lips meeting in a clash of galaxies and starglow and the first thing Lance can think is _fuck, oh fuck, we're kissing we're definitely kissing oh fuck oh fuck_. The kiss is soaked with want and need and release and desperate mouths, and Lance's hands are on Keith's waist with Keith wrapping his arms tight around Lance's neck like he's his lifeline, their bodies flush against each other till they've turned into lightning that's red-hot and sizzling and  _fuck_ , Lance hadn't known he'd wanted this as much as he does until a small moan escapes from the back of his throat and makes the other boy smile into the kiss. They pull apart with swollen lips and breathless lungs, Keith resting his head on Lance's shoulder, and they're so close and Lance can feel his heart beating louder than a fucking train barrelling towards a city-

" _You_  are such a goddamn  _revolution_ ," Keith murmurs huskily, emphatically, digging his palms more into the base of Lance's neck like he's trying to stop their surroundings from spinning, but the only thing he can see is Keith and that just sends him spiralling backwards in anticlockwise circles. They kiss again and it’s like a fever dream and it feels like _hours_ until they pull away, panting loudly, boys who’ve melded together from galaxies far apart because destiny is fucking strange and Lance _loves_ him, he knows, _I fucking love this boy more than anything else in this shitty ass universe.  
  
_ Keith just rests his head on Lance's chest, and it doesn't feel like anything is real, Lance thinks. They're suspended in a fantasy.

_(God, we may as well not be on Earth right now, Keith. It's fucking 2am on a whole other damn planet, 2am on Jupiter when I'm with you.)_

_"_ Keith, I just thought the cheesiest thing ever and I'm disgusted with myself and you're a literal star, so can we not talk about this, like,  _ever_? I love you, man, so let's just go fucking _do this_ ," he groans, and Keith's laugh is a dreamcatcher, an orchestra.  
"I told you already, I  _know_ ," he replies- and then he's tugging on Lance's hands impatiently, and they've thrown the paint cans over the wall, and they're grabbing onto the spaces between white bricks like footholds made of pure, distilled magic. Keith stumbles and nearly falls down but Lance grips onto him tightly and scrapes the skin raw off of his knees, candy red; and then, and  _then_  they're both being haled downwards on the other side of the wall by some sort of razor-sharp, quickfire magnetism, tumbling wildly as the scratchy cement gives out to steep, asphalt-clad concrete and corroded flower petals, plunging so fast that they're bending their backs to touch darkness and getting pulled out into the open again and laughing and gasping and laughing again and again and  _again_ till it's all over, till they've cartwheeled to a halt, till they're dizzy and derailed with dust settling all around them in the rush of it. 

"Come on, come on,  _come on!"_ Keith implores as they sprint down the campus, and Lance has no ideas how this strange, introverted, lone alien boy is somehow even more excited than him, projecting all of his emotions for once shamelessly across his features in dulcet mauve eyelids and a wide, world-stretched smile. They're getting sweaty, now, still hand-in-hand as they hurriedly try to avoid making too much noise with their feet but interminably thudding heavily on the tarmac anyway, giggling and high on each other. The sky is purple, stars thinning and begging to be adored, fault lines cracking against each other like diamonds until their weight brings the moon beneath the horizon to rest.

Sendak's building is just as Lance remembers it: modern and sturdy with a glass elevator jutting off of the side, observation domes reflecting dappled moonlight off their exterior, thick copper poles supporting the structure and casting waning shadows along the ground.   
  
"Oh, yeah, baby. The time has finally come," Lance announces, "to overthrow the authority and make a fucking  _stand_  against this shitty excuse of a man! My favourite hobby, obviously. Let's  _goooo_ , Keith!"  
"Always," Keith laughs and entertains Lance’s fantasy of showcasing this event to the whole world, and then they bring out the spray cans and Lance uncaps them clumsily and they find a patch of white wall and they go absolutely fucking  _wild_.

The colours bleed in shades of cool, indigos, pinks and reds and yellows and electric fucking  _storms_  against the clean and reticent ivory, extinguishing the hospital-like, tailored perfection of the architecture and turning it into a beautiful and fucking  _terrible_  work of art instead. Neither of them are particularly good at it but the sound of their whooping and laughter would be enough to bring in police from a  _thousand_  miles away, their knuckles colliding as they twist and turn and  _spray_ colour, colour,  _colour_  into the dying grey light, weave trails of iridescent neutrinos and ignite soda cans of fizzy supernovae over the walls,  _explode._

There they paint, two boys framed by the vanilla nightscape of a dripping sky and snow-white security lights and the distant twinkling iridescence of high-rise skyscrapers beyond; ruins of nuclear cities floating in the starry wind, music pounding distantly from balconies in beats of gold and hip-hop in the summer. The whole process doesn't take very long, but when they're done they draw back and gaze in drunken euphoria, Keith's star-spangled blends of prismatic colour interrupted by what's unmistakeably Lance's handwriting, spelling out:

_ALIENS EXIST, AND THEY SAY FUCK YOU._

"Yeah,  _fuck_  you," Keith can't stop himself from grinning from cheek-to-cheek and his jaw  _aches_  from how much he's smiled in the past half an hour, and then Lance screams " _fuck you_!" again and again for good measure and draws his arm all the way back to toss one empty paint can against Sendak's window; and that's when it all goes wrong because the glass manages to somehow fracture and rain down in shards of stardrops, and suddenly there's an alarm blaring out across the school and everything in dyed in shades of flashing, glowing red and Lance is mouthing " _oopsies"_ to Keith and they realise they're fucked.

"We're fucked," Lance shrieks, ever the observant physicist he is, and then- " _RUN_!" as they throw the rest of the cans through the window of Sendak's office before running, running,  _running_ , leaping and soaring over the security lights till they've reached the wall again and they're trying to scale it in point-blanc  _one second_  and they both manage to fall halfway and have to hoist themselves up again, bleeding and charred to the bone and still laughing like maniacs, trying to the very end till they're finally over and free and  _sailing_  to the stolenvan as police cars wail in the distance and the sky is stained siren-blue but who cares, who cares, they have each other now so  _who the fuck cares._

 _("For heck's sake, Keith," Lance wails as a shrill, discordant, distinguishably metallic car alarm begins to pierce through the air like a siren, probably alerting everyone in a ten-mile radius that yes, there are two boys illegally trespassing on the precipice of this range, plausibly about to steal a goddamn van that isn't even authorised to exist by the government anymore, let alone get driven.)  
  
_ As they pile themselves into the van in a clammy mess of intertwined limbs and knotted hair and racing wildhearts, Keith screams, "Lance! Did you ever think we'd come this far?"  
"No!" Lance yells back instantaneously over the din of the alarm and the screeching engine as Keith turns the keys, pushes for ignition, and they tear back onto the road again, leaving behind firedust and stars and the taste of crystal-bright hope in their flurry and wake.  
"No, I didn't think we'd come this far, and it's probably a bad idea but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, right?!"  
"Never," Keith beams, and there's something like molten happiness dancing all silver and liquescent lavender in his eyes, worlds apart from the sadness Lance had first seen on the beach where they'd somehow,  _somehow_  met, by coincidence or by fate Lance will never discern.

Still, their hands meet over the stick shift as though they've known each other's fingertips for a lifetime, and warmth fizzes beneath Lance's bones like there are entire universes being forged in the plasma of his veins. Keith smiles, and the Big Bang detonates in sparks of sundust and serendipity again, like the very first instance Lance saw it all those days ago.

He hopes he sees it again for a billion days to come, cruising down the starlit roads with the cosmos perched upon their shoulders.

_(I always knew that you were out there, interstellar light-years away, far from the sun where no one knows. I always knew that you'd find me.)_

_(And I'm so fucking glad you exist after all, Keith. I'm so fucking glad you exist.)_

 

_\--  
  
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**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS and stuff bc i love reading and replying to them, and they make me very happy in the darkest times (like having to wait for season 4 smh -- also getting exam results later this month yay (!) ). 
> 
> again, a MASSIVE thank you to my artist @z-bop whose support and art really made writing this so worthwhile. SHE IS AMAZING AND SO SO TALENTED PLS APPRECIATE HER ART. there'll be more coming soon, so i'll add them when they're finished!!
> 
> y'all can talk to my aspiring-to-be-an-astrophysicist ass on my tumblr or instagram (@starglowed) i am v passionate about stars, sci fi, and klance
> 
> PINTEREST BOARD FOR FIC: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/starglowed/2am-on-jupiter/


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